Weekend Roundup [160 - 169]

Sunday, October 1, 2017

Weekend Roundup

Hard to get psyched up for this week, what with my website woes, having sunk a lot of time into yesterday's Streamnotes, and various other malaises. Two pieces of relative good news this week: the Graham-Cassidy bill to repeal-and-decimate Obamacare failed to advance to a vote; and HHS Secretary Tom Price, one of the Cabinet's most obnoxious secretaries, was forced to resign. Hurricane Marie is much reduced and well out to sea, heading toward Ireland, and no new Atlantic hurricanes have been named. On the other hand, that just leaves the destruction Marie wrought in Puerto Rico in the media spotlight, with the Trump administration all but cursing the Spanish-American War (wasn't that the first great MAGA crusade?). Meanwhile, Republicans are pushing "tax reform" with no evident ability to make their numbers add up.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Karen DeYoung, et al: Trump signed presidential directive ordering actions to pressure North Korea: This included extensive cyberwarfare operations against North Korea. Not clear on exact chronology, but this suggests that much of the confrontation with North Korea was precipitated by Trump's direction.

  • Anne Gearan: The swamp rises around an administration that promised to drain it:

    Candidate Trump would have been appalled.

    "A vote for Hillary is a vote to surrender our government to public corruption, graft and cronyism that threatens the very foundations of our constitutional system," Trump said during an Oct. 29 speech.

    He went on to describe his broader belief that public corruption and cronyism were eating away at voters' faith in government -- a situation he would remedy.

    "I want the entire corrupt Washington establishment to hear and to heed the words I am about to say," Trump said. "When we win on Nov. 8, we are going to Washington, D.C., and we are going to drain the swamp." . . .

    Trump's critics say no one should be surprised that he hasn't followed through on his campaign promise. They argue that the mere idea of a flamboyantly rich New York real estate mogul as the champion of workaday lunch buckets in Middle America was silly.

    "The tone on this stuff gets set at the top," said Brian Fallon, spokesman for Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign and a former Justice Department official in the Obama administration.

    "Tom Price's wasteful jet-setting is not causing Trump embarrassment because it violates any kind of reform mind-set within the Trump administration. No such mind-set exists," Fallon said. "It is simply because Price got caught and is reminding everyone of how Trump has turned Washington into an even bigger swamp than it was in the first place."

    Of course, it was ridiculous to ever think that Trump, let alone a Congress run by Republicans, would so much as lift a finger to try to curtail the influence of money in Washington or more generally in politics. It was easy to tar Hillary on this account, given how much she seemed to prefer courting donors to voters, given how brazenly the Clintons had cultivated influence peddling (going back to Arkansas, when he was Governor and she sat on the WalMart board), and given how they had risen from bankruptcy to considerable wealth cashing in their chips after he left office in 2001. But while Democrats from Grover Cleveland to Barack Obama provided a measure of background corruption in government, it was the self-styled "party of greed" that hosted our most notorious corruption scandals: Grant's Credit Mobilier, Harding's Teapot Dome, Reagan's HUD scandals and Iran-Contra, and too many squalid affairs under Bush-Cheney to name. But never before have the Republicans nominated someone as rapacious and as shameless as Trump. Tom Price ran into trouble not by offending Trump's ethics but his ego, by acting like he's entitled to the same perks as the boss. If anyone ever doubted that "public corruption, graft and cronyism that threatens the very foundations of our constitutional system," Trump will show them.

  • David A Graham: Why Does Trump Keep Praising the Emergency Response in Puerto Rico? "The president's insistence that he's doing a great job sits uneasily with stories of desperation in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria."

    Part of this seems to be Trump's struggle to project empathy, which he displayed in the early days after Hurricane Harvey, where he excelled at the inspirational, rah-rah, we will rebuild aspects of presidential response, but found it very hard to show he felt the pain of Gulf Coast residents. (By contrast, he has expressed caution about what to do in Puerto Rico, tweeting, "The fact is that Puerto Rico has been destroyed by two hurricanes. Big decisions will have to be made as to the cost of its rebuilding!") Another part is Trump's tendency toward puffery: In all situations, for his entire career, his impulse has been to magnify and celebrate his own prowess and success, and so he's doing that here too. But that fake-it-till-you-make-it approach understandably rankles people like Yulín.

    Damning as this is, it's way too kind to Trump, already forgetting that he did a completely dreadful job of showing empathy in Texas -- although at least there he made a little effort to fake it. AT least he acknowledges that Texas is part of "his" America, something that he doesn't feel with Puerto Rico. A couple more sample pieces on how the Trump administration is handling the Puerto Rico crisis: Trump Attacks Critics of Puerto Rico Aid Effort: 'Politically Motivated Ingrates'; FEMA Administrator Swipes at San Juan Mayor, Those Who 'Spout Off' About Aid.

  • Sarah Kliff: Obamacare repeal isn't dead as long as Republicans control Congress: In fact, lots of horrible things will keep coming up as long as Republicans control Congress. A couple weeks ago my cousin asked me who I'd like to see the Democrats nominate in 2020, and my response was that it doesn't matter until Democrats can start winning state and local races, especially for Congress. One thing I continue to fault both Clinton and Obama on is their loss of Congress two years into their first terms, and their failure to build up effective coattails even when they won second terms. Hillary Clinton spent a ton of time raising money, but didn't build up any down-ticket strength to build her own candidacy on -- a big part of the reason she lost. Without Congressional support, neither Clinton nor Obama got more than a tiny percentage of their platforms implemented, and that failure in turn ate at the credibility of their promises -- something Hillary paid dearly for, which in turn is why we're suffering through Trump and the Republican Congress.

  • Paul Krugman: Shifts Get Real: Understanding the GOP's Policy Quagmire: I mentioned in the intro that Republican plans don't add up: they want big cuts in tax brackets, especially for corporations from 35% to 20%, and they want to eliminate the estate tax altogether, but even a few of those things would bust the budget. "Reforms" to simplify the code and eliminate current deductions could offset at least some of the cuts, but those all look like tax increases to those who currently benefit, and their lobbies are out in force to keep that from happening. Even busting the budget is a problem given the Senate's no-filibuster "reconciliation" path. So while everyone in the majority caucus is sworn to cut taxes, getting there may prove difficult.

    Right now it looks as if tax "reform" -- actually it's just cuts -- may go the way of Obamacare repeal. Initial assessments of the plan are brutal, and administration attempts to spin things in a positive direction will suffer from loss of credibility on multiple fronts, from obvious lies about the plan itself, to spreading corruption scandals, to the spectacle of the tweeter-in-chief golfing while Puerto Rico drowns. . . .

    One important goal of ACA repeal was to loosen those constraints, by repealing the high-end tax hikes that paid for Obamacare, hence giving a big break to the donor class. Having failed to do that, Rs are under even more pressure to deliver the goods to the wealthy through tax cuts.

    But deficits are a constraint, even if not a hard one. Now, Republicans have always claimed that they can cut tax rates without losing revenue by closing loopholes. But they've always avoided saying anything about which loopholes they'd close; they promised to shift the tax burden away from their donors onto [TK], some mystery group. It was magic asterisk city; it was "Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree" on steroids. . . .

    So what were they thinking? My guess is that they weren't thinking. What we learned from health care was that after 8 years, Republicans had never bothered to learn anything about the issues. There's every reason to believe that the same is true for the distribution of tax changes, which Paul Ryan called a "ridiculous" issue and presumably nobody in his party ever tried to understand.

    So now the lies and willful ignorance are catching up with them -- again.

    An earlier Krugman post ( Unpopular Delusions and the Madness of Elites) notes some polling and adds:

    There really is no clamor, even among Republicans, for tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations. And overall public opinion is strongly against.

    Nor is there a technocratic case for these cuts. There is no evidence whatsoever that tax cuts produce great economic outcomes -- zero, zilch, nada. The "experts" who claim otherwise are all hired guns, and notably incompetent hired guns at that.

    Yet faith in and demands for tax cuts remains; it's the ultimate zombie idea. And it's obvious why: advocating tax cuts for the rich and inventing rationales for those cuts is very lucrative.

    also, in Voodoo Gets Even Voodooier:

    That said, Trumpcuts are an even worse idea than Reaganomics, and not just because we start from much higher debt, the legacy of the financial crisis, which cut deeply into revenue and temporarily boosted spending. It also matters that we start from a much lower top tax rate than Reagan did. . . . So even if you believed that voodoo economics worked under Reagan -- which it didn't -- it would take a lot more voodoo, in fact around 4 times as much, for it to work now.

    Which makes you wonder: how can they possibly sell this as a responsible plan? Oh, right: they'll just lie.

  • Peter O'Dowd: 18-Hour Vietnam Epic Is Lesson on Horror of 'Unleashing Gods of War': Actually, the interview isn't that interesting, except for a long quote on the Burns-Novick documentary from Daniel Ellsberg:

    I think there were some some major omissions that are quite fundamental that disturbed me quite a bit, although the overall thing is very impressive.

    First of all, the repeated statement that this was a civil war on which we were taking one side, I think it's profoundly misleading. It always was a war in which one side is entirely paid, equipped, armed, pressed forward by foreigners. Without the foreigners, no war. That's not a civil war. And that puts -- it very much undermines, I'd say, a fundamentally misleading statement at the very beginning in the first five minutes or so of the first session.

    I don't see anything in the Pentagon Papers, 7,000 pages, that could be called good faith by anybody, in terms of the American people, our values, our Constitution. This was a war, as I say initially, to keep Vietnam a French colony. And that was not admitted to the American people. It was well known inside. We preferred that they be at war, and there was never a year that there would have been a war at all without American money in the end. So I thought that was extremely misleading.

    I'll probably write some more about Vietnam later, but I do want to add one comment on the last episode, which features heavily the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC. The design suggests a gash in the earth, one side lined with black marble engraved with the names of 58,318 Americans who died perpetuating this war. I find it impossible to look at this wall and not imagine extending it upward to include the three million Vietnamese who also died. It seems extraordinarily conceited, even more so misleading, to omit those names. Of course, if you want to preserve the gash-in-the-earth visual effect, you could dig a deeper hole instead of building the wall up hundreds of feet.

  • Alex Pareene: You Are Jonathan Chait's Enemy: Chait is complaining "about the 'dangerous consequences' of the left's use of the label 'white supremacist' to describe Donald Trump, the alt-right, and American conservatism in general," in what Pareene describes as "just another paint-by-numbers 'the greatest threat to free speech in the nation today is college students heckling an asshole' column."

    Chait is policing the way the left does politics because he does not want the left-wing style of doing politics to gain prominence.

    Something that is well-known to people who've read Chait for years, but may not be apparent to those who just think of him as a standard-issue center-left pundit who is sort of clueless about race, is that he is engaged in a pretty specific political project: Ensuring that you and people like you don't gain control of his party.

    Pareene's getting a bit touchy here, but he's not the only one suspicious that so-called centrists relish attacking the left while offering the right undeserved respect and legitimacy -- which in the long run works in their favor. The problem with centrism is that the track record doesn't show that taking such a conciliatory stance delivers much in the way of tangible benefits -- indeed, if anything it shows retreats while the right grows stronger and more aggressive. It seems time to ask whether stronger leftist critiques might turn out to be more effective, especially with people who don't start out with a strong political stance. For instance, why not refer to people as white supremacists who may merely be garden variety racists? -- especially people like Trump who seem so comfortable aligned with undoubted white supremacists like the KKK?

  • David Rothkopf: The NSC is 70 this week -- and the first thing it ever did was meddle in a foreign election: In 1947, created by the National Security Act, its first paper ("NSC 1") approved by Truman to covertly meddle in elections in Italy, "trying to counter the effects of the Soviets to support the rise of the Italian Communist Party," no mention of the popularity the PCI gained by resisting Mussolini and the German occupation. Of course, the CIA went on to do much more than merely game foreign elections; e.g.: Vincent Bevins: In Indonesia, the 'fake news' that fueled a Cold War massacre is still potent five decades later:

    Gen. Suharto, then the head of the army's strategic reserve command and relying on support from the CIA, accused the powerful Communist Party of orchestrating a coup attempt and took over as the military's de facto leader. Over the next few months, his forces oversaw the systematic execution of at least 500,000 Indonesians, and historians say they may have killed up to 1 million. The massacre decimated the world's third-largest Communist Party (behind those of the Soviet Union and China), and untold numbers were tortured and killed simply for allegedly associating with communists.

    The military dictatorship that formed afterward, led by Suharto, made wildly inaccurate anti-communist propaganda a cornerstone of its legitimacy and ruled Indonesia with U.S. support until 1998.

  • Alex Thompson/Ryan Grim: Kansas Won't Expand Medicaid, Denying a Lifeline to Rural Hospitals and Patients: Well, some, like the one in Independence, are already dead. Gov. Brownback, who vetoed the bill to expand Medicaid, has been nominated to a State Department post to hector the world on God, but Lt. Gov. Colyer promises to veto future bills as well, so no relief in sight.

  • Zeynep Tufekci: Zuckerberg's Preposterous Defense of Facebook: It's become clear that Russia created hundreds of clandestine Facebook accounts and used them and Facebook's advertising system to spread misinformation about the 2016 election. People are upset about that because they don't like the idea of a foreign power attempting to tilt an American election, possibly as a general principle but often just because it's Russia attempting to undermine Hillary Clinton and/or to elect Trump. Still, doesn't the US do the same thing to other countries? And don't both parties and their donors do the same thing to each other? I have no doubt that Facebook makes the general problem much worse, mostly because it allows unprecedentely precise, even intimate, targeting by whoever's willing to put the money into it. Advertisers have been trying to refine targeting for decades, but they've mostly been concerned with efficiency -- getting the most cost-effective set of buyers to consider a standard product pitch. Political advertising is different because votes are different from purchases, and, given limited choices, negative advertising is often more effective. Until recently, we could limit this damage by requiring disclosure of whoever is buying the advertising. Facebook undermines this paradigm in several ways: it helps advertisers hide their identity, and thereby avoid responsibility for any damages; it allows messages to be very narrowly tailored; its effect is amplified by viral "sharing"; it precludes any systematic effort to recall or correct misinformation. Americans have long been lulled into the lure of advertising, which offers to pay for entertainment and news while only demanding a small (and initially distinct) slice of your time. And we've basically gone along with this scheme because we haven't noticed what it's doing to us -- much like a lobster doesn't notice heating water until it's much too late. It's going to be difficult to unravel all these levels of duplicity and to restore any measure of integrity to the democratic process. But two things should be clear by now: the fact that someone like Donald Trump got elected president shows that our system for informing ourselves about the world is badly broken; and that as long as powerful forces -- I'd start with virtually all corporations, most Republicans, and many Democrats, and throw in a few more special interest groups (not least the CIA and the post-KGB -- believe that they benefit from this system there will be much resistance to changing it. Indeed, it probably has to be defeated before it can be changed.

    By the way, Matt Taibbi has a relevant piece: Latest Fake News Panic Appears to Be Fake News, wherein he suggests:

    The irony here is that the solution to so much of this fake news panic is so simple. If we just spent more time outside, or read more books, or talked in person to real human beings more often, we'd be less susceptible to this sort of thing. But that would take effort, and who has time for that?

  • Matthew Yglesias: 4 stories that really mattered this week: i.e., more than Trump's spat with the NFL: Obamacare repeal died again; Puerto Rico is in crisis; Republicans rolled out a tax cut plan; Roy Moore won the GOP nomination in Alabama. Other recent Yglesias posts: Trump is proposing big tax hikes on vulnerable House Republicans' constituents (ending deductability of state and local taxes [SALT], a big deal in upscale suburban districts); A House Republican explains why deficits don't matter anymore: Mark Walker says "It's a great talking point when you have an administration that's Democrat-led" -- this just confirms what we've already observed, as when Nixon declared "we're all Keynesians now" when he wanted more deficit spending to prop up his re-election economy, or Cheney declared "deficits don't matter," yet Clinton and Obama were constantly pounded over deficit spending; Trump keeps saying Graham-Cassidy failed because a senator's in the hospital; Nobody wants Donald Trump's corporate tax cut plan: "Americans overwhelmingly want large businesses to pay more taxes rather than less"; The Jones Act, the obscure 1920 shipping regulation strangling Puerto Rico, explained; Trump's plan to sell tax cuts for the rich is to pretend they're not happening; Democrats ought to invest in Doug Jones's campaign against Roy Moore; Angela Merkel won in a landslide -- now comes the hard part; Donald Trump versus the NFL, explained.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, September 24, 2017

Weekend Roundup

Biggest news for me is that the server I use for TomHull.com is wedged, with no disk space available for uploading updates. I may (or may not) be able to insert this post into the blog software (which I've had problems with in the past, but evidently uses its own separate storage), but cannot update the "faux blog" (which I've been linking to for the last year-plus). The ISP, Addr.com, seems to be on auto-pilot, with all of their support tools broken and no one responding even to email. I know I've threatened this in the past, but I suppose I have to bite the bullet and move the site. That will be a pain for me, and disruptive for the world -- as if I don't have enough problems already.

Some fairly large topics I have nothing on below: Hurricane Maria and the mass destruction of Dominica and Puerto Rico; devastating earthquakes in Mexico; elections in Germany which gave the far-right AfD party seats in parliament; the never-ending Russia investigation (starring Paul Manafort and Facebook this week); Betsy DeVos' latest efforts to make college a safe haven for rapists; a revised anti-Muslim travel ban; the ongoing protests against police brutality and injustice in St. Louis (special hat tip to Greg Magarian and Bronwen Zwirner on the ground there); and, of course, the big deal of protesting the national anthem at NFL football games (and Trump's hate tweets against those who do) -- the latter is the subject of the first five articles at Slate, and evidently the top trending hashtag(s) at Twitter (Jeffrey Goldberg tweet: "The President of the United States is now in a war with Stephen Curry and LeBron James. This is not a war Trump will win").

Some more reviews of Hillary Clinton's What Happened and comments on the 2016 election:

  • Glenn Greenwald: The Clinton Book Tour Is Largely Ignoring the Vital Role of Endless War in the 2016 Election Result:

    Part of that is the discomfort of cognitive dissonance: the Democratic branding and self-glorification as enemies of privilege, racism, and violence are directly in conflict with the party's long-standing eagerness to ignore, or even actively support, policies which kill large numbers of innocent people from Pakistan, Libya, and Somalia to Yemen, Iraq, and Gaza, but which receive scant attention because of the nationality, ethnicity, poverty, distance, and general invisibility of their victims.

    Actually, Hillary gets hurt in several ways: because she always rose to support the wars, no one can identify with her as a war critic; because she was actually in office during much of this time (as senator and especially as secretary of state) she bears some responsibility for the failure of the wars to accomplish their proclaimed goals; and the simple fact is that after 15 years of continuous war Americans are poorer and meaner than they would have been otherwise, and Republicans feed on that.

  • Katherine Krueger: Hillary Clinton Will Never Understand What Happened:

    Those looking for mea culpas will get them, but only up to a point, and always closely followed by qualifications. . . . She then pivots to consider the "strong headwinds" her scrappy little $623 million campaign-that-couldn't was up against. . . .

    Most of all, Clinton can't understand why young voters were won over by Sen. Bernie Sanders. And it is here where the essential cynicism underlying her worldview -- and which ultimately played a key role in her doom -- comes most sharply into focus. For Clinton, politics are fundamentally about pragmatism, where strategic concessions and horse-trading with Republicans necessarily means sacrificing ideals for the ultimate good of Getting (Some) Things Done. To her, change within the system is needed and worthy, but the system itself can never change. . . .

    After a career built on steadfastly upholding the status quo, Clinton didn't share the anger of the people she sought to govern, because, to her, the state of the U.S. is not something to be angry about. Even as she criss-crossed the country talking with veterans and moms and immigrants, their problems were never her problems. As her fellow Americans continue to lose their jobs and homes and fall into medical debt and struggle with opioid addictions, the system Clinton has for years fought to keep intact is humming along just fine. The fact that racism, militarism, inequality, and religious fundamentalism pervade this country, or that poor people are being consumed by the gears of our economy and left exhausted in its dust, is not something to get "angry" about. In Clinton's words, "It's always been thus."

  • Jon Schwartz: Hillary Clinton doesn't understand why the corporate media is so bad:

    The New York Times, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, et al., are gigantic corporations -- in most cases owned by even larger ones. And the job of giant corporations is not to inform American citizens about reality. It's not to play a hallowed role in the history of a self-governing republic. It's to make as much profit as possible. That in turn means the corporate media will never, ever be "liberal" in any genuine sense and will be hostile to all politicians who feint in that direction.

    From that perspective, the media's performance in 2016 was a shining, glorious success. As Les Moonves effused just as the primaries were starting, Donald Trump's campaign was "good for us economically. . . . Go Donald! Keep getting out there!" The entire Hieronymus Bosch-like nightmare, said Moonves, "may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS." CNN made $1 billion in profits during the election year, far more than ever before.

  • Matthew Yglesias: What really happened in 2016, in 7 charts: The key one is the monumental unpopularity of both candidates. Still, in that comparison, the odd thing is that Trump ranks much worse than Clinton, yet more people who disliked Trump voted for him than people who disliked Clinton voted for her. Why was that? My best guess is that having no real track record, people significantly underestimated how damaging Trump would be, whereas she was much more of a known, and one of the main things you knew was she would be dogged by and endless procession of (mostly) fake scandals as long as she was in the public eye. Trump exploited this by asking the question: "what have you got to lose?"

  • Joshua Holland: How Right-Wing Media Played the Mainstream Press in the 2016 Election: Not on Hillary's book, but this is the piece she should have read before writing up her excuses.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Andrew J Bacevich: Past All Reason: Review of the 18-hour Ken Burns-Lynn Novick documentary The Vietnam War and, to some extent, the war itself. The series remains focused on its American audience, going out of its way to stress the patriotism and idealism of American soldiers (though less so of America's political leaders and generals). But it shies away from war propaganda, mostly because they make extensive use of Vietnamese voices (from all sides) and video -- putting human faces on people long caricatured in American minds.

    Burns and Novick pay surprisingly little attention to why exactly the United States insisted on butting in and why it subsequently proved so difficult to get out. Their lack of interest in this central issue is all the more striking given the acute misgivings about a large-scale US intervention that Lyndon Johnson repeatedly expressed in the fateful months between late 1964 and early 1965.

    The anguished president doubted that the war could be won, didn't think it was worth fighting, and knew that further expansion of US involvement in Vietnam would put at risk his cherished Great Society domestic-reform program. . . . Despite his reservations, Johnson -- ostensibly the most powerful man in the world -- somehow felt compelled to go ahead anyway. Yet Burns and Novick choose not to explore why exactly Johnson felt obliged to do what he did not want to do.

    Our present situation makes the question all the more salient. The US war in Afghanistan, although smaller in scale than the war in Vietnam, has dragged on even longer. It too has turned out to be a misbegotten enterprise. When running for the presidency, Donald Trump said as much in no uncertain terms. But President Trump -- ostensibly the most powerful man in the world -- has not turned his skepticism into action, allowing America's longest war to continue. . . . As Trump has affirmed, even (or perhaps especially) presidents must bow to this pernicious bit of secular theology.

    According to Burns and Novick, the American war in Vietnam was "begun in good faith, by decent people." It comes closer to the truth to say that the war was begun -- and then prolonged past all reason -- by people who lacked wisdom and, when it was most needed, courage.

    Other reviews:

    Whereas I found the first four episodes valuable, the biases in the fifth (January-July 1967) started to get out of hand. It's not clear yet whether Burns-Novick will wind up adopting the position that the only reason the US lost in Vietnam was that the American people let the Vietnamese down -- the early episodes seemed to recognize that the American neo-colonial project never had a chance, but their take on the Tet Offensive suggests the opposite. Also, as is still the case in St. Louis today, their cameras love to seek out violence in antiwar protests, and their narrative goes out of its way to stress the that there was still much pro-war support -- what Nixon would come to call "the silent majority" (something I expect we'll hear much more about in later episodes).

  • Sarah Kliff: I've Covered the GOP repeal plans since day one. Graham-Cassidy is the most radical. It surely says something about rank-and-file Republicans these days that each and every time their "repeal-and-replace" bills fail to pass, they go back to the drawing board to come up with something even more damaging.

    While other Republican plans essentially create a poorly funded version of the Affordable Care Act, Graham-Cassidy blows it up. The bill offered by Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy takes money from states that did a good job getting residents covered under Obamacare and gives it to states that did not. It eliminates an expansion of the Medicaid program that covers millions of Americans in favor of block grants. States aren't required to use the money to get people covered or to help subsidize low- and middle-income earners, as Obamacare does now.

    Plus, the bill includes other drastic changes that appeared in some previous bills. Insurers in the private marketplace would be allowed to discriminate against people with preexisting conditions, for example. And it would eliminate the individual mandate as other bills would have, but this time there is no replacement. Most analysts agree that would inject chaos into the individual market.

    The right has employed the back-to-the-states scam before, but it strikes me as especially explosive here: whereas now we have a unified national debate about health care policy, this bill will turn health care info a burning issue for fifty state political contests -- an area where Republicans have gained considerable power recently not least due to the widespread perception that states don't matter much. That strikes me as a big political risk: both to their own control in competitive states, and because at least some blue states will use those block grants to implement single-payer schemes (not that they won't be inhibited by cutbacks and other regulations).

    More on the Graham-Cassidy health care bill:

  • Fred Kaplan: Trump's Reasons for Scrapping the Iran Deal Are the Definition of Self-Destructive. Also see the Trita Parsi pieces below.

  • John Nichols: Bernie Sanders Just Gave One of the Finest Speeches of His Career: "Outlining a vision of an America on the side of peace and justice, the senator shredded Trump's brutish foreign policies." Sanders gave his speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri -- the site of several famous world affairs speeches, including the one in 1946 when Winston Churchill coined the term "iron curtain," to some extent starting the Cold War. This is especially noteworthy because Sanders has long shied away from challenging the precepts of American foreign policy. Some more links:

    Sanders' speech stands in especially stark contrast to Trump's UN speech. For more on that, see:

  • Evan Osnos: The Risk of Nuclear War With North Korea: A long "letter from Pyongyang," which Osnos recently visited for a tightly guided tour. While he wasn't able to meet many people, or see many things, that first-person experience gives him a leg up on Trump, his generals, Nikki Haley, or pretty much anyone else in the administration. The portrait he paints of Kim Jong Un is actually pretty scary, but the balance of terror is firmly if cavalierly dominated by Washington.

    There is also scattered support for a less confrontational option, a short-term deal known as a "freeze for freeze." North Korea would stop weapons development in exchange for a halt or a reduction in U.S.-South Korean military exercises. Proponents say that a freeze, which could be revoked if either side cheats, is hardly perfect, but the alternatives are worse. Critics say that versions of it have been tried, without success, and that it will damage America's alliance with the South. Thus far the Trump Administration has no interest. "The idea that some have suggested, of a so-called 'freeze for freeze,' is insulting," Nikki Haley, the U.N. Ambassador, said before the Security Council on September 4th. "When a rogue regime has a nuclear weapon and an ICBM pointed at you, you do not take steps to lower your guard."

    Outside the Administration, the more people I talked to, the more I heard a strong case for some level of diplomatic contact. When Obama dispatched James Clapper to Pyongyang, in 2014, to negotiate the release of two prisoners, Clapper discovered that North Korea had misread the purpose of the trip. The government had presumed that he was coming in part to open a new phase in the relationship. "They were bitterly disappointed," he said. Clapper's visit convinced him that the absence of diplomatic contact is creating a dangerous gulf of misperception. "I was blown away by the siege mentality -- the paranoia -- that prevails among the leadership of North Korea. When we sabre-rattle, when we fly B-1s accompanied by jet escorts from the Republic of Korea and Japan, it makes us feel good, it reassures the allies, but what we don't factor in is the impact on the North Koreans."

    The striking thing about the Haley quote is how easily North Korea could justify taking the same stance. North Koreans surely recall that prominent US generals advocating nuking Korea during the 1950-53 war. And while it's only been since the 1960s that the US has had ICBMs capable of hitting Korea, the US has had conventional bombers within striking distance since that war. So what gives us the right to insist that North Korea lower its guard? If it's that the US should be trusted, that isn't a very convincing argument. Another quote:

    Our grasp of North Korea's beliefs and expectations is not much better than its grasp of ours. To go between Washington and Pyongyang at this nuclear moment is to be struck, most of all, by how little the two understand each other. In eighteen years of reporting, I've never felt as much uncertainty at the end of a project, a feeling that nobody -- not the diplomats, the strategists, or the scholars who have devoted their lives to the subject -- is able to describe with confidence how the other side thinks. We simply don't know how Kim Jong Un really regards the use of his country's nuclear arsenal, or how much North Korea's seclusion and mythology has distorted its understanding of American resolve. We don't know whether Kim Jong Un is taking ever-greater risks because he is determined to fulfill his family's dream of retaking South Korea, or because he is afraid of ending up like Qaddafi.

    More on Korea this week:

    A recent poll shows that Trump is especially untrusted by Americans to deal with North Korea (see Trump seen by 66 percent in US as doing more to divide than united country): the "trust to act responsibly handling North Korea" is 37% favorable, 62% negative, compared to which US military leaders score 72-27% favorable. The notion that military leaders are both competent and trustworthy is widely held, though I'd be hard pressed to cite any evidence showing it should be. One cautionary piece is: Stephen Kinzer: America's Slow-Motion Military Coup. He notes that "given the president's ignorance of world affairs, the emergence of a military junta in Washington may seem like welcome relief," then goes on to offer some reasons to worry. There's been much talk of a coup since Trump took office, but that seems unlikely as long as Trump lets the junta do whatever they want. The only time I've actually worried that the military brass might move against civilian government was when Clinton was elected in 1992, but his surrender to the chiefs was so complete they didn't have to flex a muscle. Obama proved to be every bit as supine, not even bothering to replace Bush's Secretary of Defense (although after Gates quit, he went through a series of safe names: Leon Panetta, Chuck Hagel, and Ash Carter).

  • Gary Rivlin/Michael Hudson: Government by Goldman: "Gary Cohn is giving Goldman Sachs everything it ever wanted from the Trump administration." Important, in-depth article, goes well beyond explaining why Cohn hasn't resigned in disgust, which he certainly felt after Trump's embrace of the Nazis in Charlottesville.

    There's Ultimately no great mystery why Donald Trump selected Gary Cohn for a top post in his administration, despite his angry rhetoric about Goldman Sachs. There's the high regard the president holds for anyone who is rich -- and the instant legitimacy Cohn conferred upon the administration within business circles. Cohn's appointment reassured bond markets about the unpredictable new president and lent his administration credibility it lacked among Fortune 100 CEOs, none of whom had donated to his campaign. Ego may also have played a role. Goldman Sachs would never do business with Trump, the developer who resorted to foreign banks and second-tier lenders to bankroll his projects. Now Goldman's president would be among those serving in his royal court.

    Who can say precisely why Cohn, a Democrat, said yes when Trump asked him to be his top economic aide? No doubt Cohn has been asking himself that question in recent weeks. But he'd hit a ceiling at Goldman Sachs. In September 2015, Goldman announced that Blankfein had lymphoma, ramping up speculation that Cohn would take over the firm. Yet four months later, after undergoing chemotherapy, Blankfein was back in his office and plainly not going anywhere. Cohn was 56 years old when he was invited to Trump Tower. An influential job inside the White House meant a face-saving exit -- and one offering a huge financial advantage. . . .

    The details of the president's "$1 trillion" infrastructure plan are similarly favorable to Goldman. As laid out in the administration's 2018 budget, the government would spend only $200 billion on infrastructure over the coming decade. By structuring "that funding to incentivize additional non-Federal funding" -- tax breaks and deals that privatize roads, bridges, and airports -- the government could take credit for "at least $1 trillion in total infrastructure spending," the budget reads.

    It was as if Cohn were still channeling his role as a leader of Goldman Sachs when, at the White House in May, he offered this advice to executives: "We say, 'Hey, take a project you have right now, sell it off, privatize it, we know it will get maintained, and we'll reward you for privatizing it.'" "The bigger the thing you privatize, the more money we'll give you," continued Cohn. By "we," he clearly meant the federal government; by "you," he appeared to be speaking, at least in part, about Goldman Sachs, whose Public Sector and Infrastructure group arranges the financing on large-scale public sector deals.

  • Jon Schwartz: The History Channel is finally telling the stunning secret story of the War on Drugs: A four-part documentary. Much of it seems to involve the CIA, which has repeatedly forged alliances with drug traffickers -- in Laos, Nicaragua, and most recently in Afghanistan.

    That core truth is: The war on drugs has always been a pointless sham. For decades the federal government has engaged in a shifting series of alliances of convenience with some of the world's largest drug cartels. So while the U.S. incarceration rate has quintupled since President Richard Nixon first declared the war on drugs in 1971, top narcotics dealers have simultaneously enjoyed protection at the highest levels of power in America.

    This might be a good place to mention Sheelah Kolhatkar: The Cost of the Opioid Crisis -- an awful piece which tries to quantify the economic costs of opioid overdoses by toting up lost hours worked and similar metrics. I don't doubt that these deaths add up to some kind of crisis, but you need to back up a bit and frame this issue in terms of two much larger, less acute crises: one is the "war on drugs," which has accomplished little other than to make people really stupid about what drugs do; the other is the for-profit health care system, which has veered inconsistently on pain management, doing first too little then too much and probably, if the crisis-mongers get their way, reverting to too little. The big money is in prescribing pills, not in monitoring treatment.

  • Matt Taibbi: The Madness of Donald Trump: Starts by noting that Trump's August 22 speech in Phoenix was "Trump's true coming-out party as an insane person." Goes on to try to draw fine distinctions between Campaign Trump, who was crazy in ways that seemed to work, and President Trump, whose craziness is becoming more and more dysfunctional. After considering the possibility that America deserves Trump, he pulls out the DSM and comes up with a diagnosis:

    Everyone with half a brain and a recent copy of the DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, used by shrinks everywhere) knew the diagnosis on Trump the instant he joined the race. Trump fits the clinical definition of a narcissistic personality so completely that it will be a shock if future psychiatrists don't rename the disorder after him.

    Grandiosity, a tendency to exaggerate achievements, a preoccupation with "fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty or ideal love," a belief in one's specialness (which can only be understood by other special people), a need for excessive admiration and a sense of entitlement -- sound like anyone you know?

    Trump's rapidly expanding list of things at which he's either a supreme expert or the Earth's best living practitioner would shame even great historical blowhards like Stalin or Mobutu Sese Seko.

    Taibbi's points on Trump's losing war with the English language are more to the point (though "he makes George W. Bush sound like Vladimir Nabokov" shows how quickly we forget). He tries to take some comfort by viewing Trump as just desserts for a country with so much blood and oppression staining its history, but Trump's too deranged to deliver a lesson on karma. For more on the madness, see: Alex Morris: Trump's Mental Health: Is Pathological Narcissism the Key to Trump's Behavior? One note here deserving caution is a study that "found that 18 of the first 37 presidents met criteria for having a psychiatric disorder," although some ailments, like depression, "do not typically lead to psychosis or risky decision-making." More interesting is this paragraph:

    When it comes to presidents, and perhaps all politicians, some level of narcissism is par for the course. Based on a 2013 study of U.S. presidents from Washington to George W. Bush, many of our chief executives with narcissistic traits shared what is called "emergent leadership," or a keen ability to get elected. They can be charming and charismatic. They dominate. They entertain. They project strength and confidence. They're good at convincing people, at least initially, that they actually are as awesome as they think they are. (Despite what a narcissist might believe, research shows they are usually no better-looking, more intelligent or talented than the average person -- though when they are, their narcissism is better tolerated.) In fact, a narcissist's brash leadership has been shown to be particularly attractive in times of perceived upheaval, which means that it benefits a narcissist to promote ideas of chaos and to identify a common enemy, or, if need be, create one.

    I've long noted something like this: the tendency of people in times of crisis to rally around whoever seemed to be the most self-confident. I figure that's something we learned in our early evolution, something that back in primitive times worked well enough it didn't get erased through natural selection. However, in modern times such "emergent leaders" rarely turn out to be wise choices.

    By the way, Taibbi has another piece out: Steve Bannon Splits From Trump: Hilarity Ensues. This is about the Republican Senatorial primary runoff between Luther Strange, who was appointed to fill Jeff Sessions' seat and is backed by Trump and McConnell, and Roy Moore, the former judge with the Moses complex who is backed by Bannon. In this contest, you'd have to say that Strange is the lesser evil, but the margin is so thin I find it hard to care. I'm even tempted to think that we might be better if they elect the greater embarrassment (Moore), although that's pretty much what happened with Trump.

    By the way, there are more Alabama races down ballot. See: Christina Cauterucci: Some of the US's Creepiest Anti-Abortion Men Are Running for Office in Alabama.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, September 17, 2017

Weekend Roundup

This has been another week when I could have spent every waking hour compiling stories and still not covered it all. There is nothing below on Korea, where there have been new missile tests, new even more vicious sanctions, and the usual threats of nuclear annihilation -- one story I was tempted by was on how the new UN sanctions attempt to choke off North Korean exports of clothing (evidently one of their major sources of foreign currency). Nothing on Nikki Haley's bluster, nor on Trump's forthcoming UN speech. Nothing on Burma's attacks on the Rohynga. (Wasn't opening up Burma Hillary Clinton's big coup as Secretary of State?) Nothing on US threats to close the embassy in Cuba. Only the most general comments on Yemen-Syria-Iraq. Nothing on Israel/Palestine, which ever deeper into an abyss of inhumanity, even while Netanyahu and family are in legal trouble. Nothing on the latest ISIS bombing in London, nor on Trump's inane tweets about it. Very little on the big hurricane season, other natural disasters, and how well (or more likely miserably) the feds are dealing with them. Nothing on voter suppression (although Kris Kobach has been busy on that front). Nothing on Jeff Sessions refusal to investigate civil rights abuse in St. Louis, nor on protests against same, nor on Missouri's governor's preference for meeting protests with a show of military force. Nothing on Harvard's failed chemistry experiment, where they tried to mix Mike Pompeo and Chelsea Manning. Nothing on the Russia investigation, where an interesting side-story has developed over Facebook advertising. Very little on so-called tax reform. Nothing on rape on college campuses, although Betsy De Vos seems to be set on making it more difficult to punish. Nothing on DACA, not even Trump's alleged DACA deal with Democrats nor the way Republicans blew up after it was reported. And I'm sure there were dozens of other stories I could have found worthy.

On the other hand, maybe there's too much on Hillary Clinton's campaign memoir, What Happened, and also on the Democrats' intra-party struggles. Perhaps that has something to do with our preoccupation with talk-about-talk. But most other stories just add to the cumulative weight of moral rot in the Trump regime. The new books by Clinton (in her backhanded way) and Sanders (much less reviewed, probably because it's much less gossipy) point forward -- as does Sanders' new "Medicare for All" bill (please stop calling it "Berniecare").

Just before posting, I noticed this piece by Jay Rosen: Normalizing Trump: An incredibly brief explainer. It offers a short list of things "most every journalist who covers Trump knows:

  1. He isn't good at anything a president has to do.
  2. He doesn't know anything about the issues with which he must cope.
  3. He doesn't care to learn.
  4. He has no views about public policy.
  5. Nothing he says can be trusted.
  6. His "model" of leadership is the humiliation of others.

He adds: "If nothing the president says can be trusted, reporting what the president says becomes absurd." That reminded me of a piece I noticed but didn't figure was worth pursuing -- until it became perfectly illustrative: Elliot Hannon: A Ranking of Trump's Sunday Morning Tweets From Least to Most Insane.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Dean Baker: Adults in the Room: The Sordid Tale of Greece's Battle Against Austerity and the Troika: Review of former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis's book, Adults in the Room. The Troika is the European Commission (EC), the European Central Bank (ECB), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Greece had run up large debts then fell into a major depression after 2007, losing 25% of its GDP -- all the worse because Greece had joined the Eurozone, leaving it at the mercy of an EU dominated by Germany. To make good on those debts, the Troika was set on forcing Greece into extreme austerity, combined with massive privatization of public assets -- a "solution" that Varoufakis understood not merely to be vicious but untenable. What happened is little short of gruesome.

  • Ross Barkan: Universal healthcare in America? Not a taboo now, thanks to Bernie Sanders: Sanders introduced his "Improved Medicare for All" last week, remarkably co-sponsored by sixteen Democratic Senators.

    Other related links:

  • Ariel Dorfman: A Tale of Two Donalds: Dorfman wrote a seminal essay, a masterpiece of Marxist cultural criticism, back in 1971, How to Read Donald Duck, one I read avidly when it was translated (and, if memory serves, published in Radical America). Here he updates his analysis to encompass that other Donald. I suppose some times history repeats itself, first as farce and then as tragedy. Other recent TomDispatch pieces:

    Here's a sample quote from Sjursen:

    Take a good, hard look at the region and it's obvious that Washington mainly supports the interests of Israel, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Egypt's military dictator, and various Gulf State autocracies. Or consider the actions and statements of the Trump administration and of the two administrations that preceded it and here's what seems obvious: the United States is in many ways little more than an air force, military trainer, and weapons depot for assorted Sunni despots. Now, that's not a point made too often -- not in this context anyway -- because it's neither a comfortable thought for most Americans, nor a particularly convenient reality for establishment policymakers to broadcast, but it's the truth. . . .

    While President Trump enjoyed a traditional sword dance with his Saudi hosts -- no doubt gratifying his martial tastes -- the air forces of the Saudis and their Gulf state allies were bombing and missiling Yemeni civilians into the grimmest of situations, including a massive famine and a spreading cholera epidemic amid the ruins of their impoverished country. So much for the disastrous two-year Saudi war there, which goes by the grimly ironic moniker of Operation Restoring Hope and for which the U.S. military provides midair refueling and advanced munitions, as well as intelligence.

    Engelhardt notes how a president supposedly obsessed with winning has surrendered his administration to three of America's "losingest generals": H.R. McMaster, John Kelly, and "Mad Dog" Mattis. For instance, consider McMaster:

    Then-Colonel H.R. McMaster gained his reputation in 2005 by leading the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment into the Iraqi city of Tal Afar and "liberating" it from Sunni insurgents, while essentially inaugurating the counterinsurgency tactics that would become the heart and soul of General David Petraeus's 2007 "surge" in Iraq.

    Only one small problem: McMaster's much-publicized "victory," like so many other American military successes of this era, didn't last. A year later, Tal Afar was "awash in sectarian violence," wrote Jon Finer, a Washington Post reporter who accompanied McMaster into that city. It would be among the first Iraqi cities taken by Islamic State militants in 2014 and has only recently been "liberated" (yet again) by the Iraqi military in a U.S.-backed campaign that has left it only partially in rubble, unlike so many other fully rubblized cities in the region. In the Obama years, McMaster would be the leader of a task force in Afghanistan that "sought to root out the rampant corruption that had taken hold" in the American-backed government there, an effort that would prove a dismal failure.

    Meanwhile, see if you can discern any hope in these recent reports from Afghanistan: Helene Cooper: US Says It Has 11,000 Troops in Afghanistan, More Than Formerly Disclosed; Rod Nordland: US Expands Kabul Security Zone, Digging in the Next Decade; Mujib Mashal: US Plan for New Afghan Force Revives Fear of Militia Abuses; Max Fisher/Amanda Taub: Why Afghanistan's War Defies Solutions.

  • Thomas Frank: Hillary Clinton's book has a clear message: don't blame me: Clinton's campaign memoir, What Happened, was released last week, generating enough publicity to put her back in the spotlight. Before publication we were treated to various sections where she tried to blame Bernie Sanders and/or his supporters for her loss, which fit in with the general perception that she's not one to take responsibility for her own mistakes. I haven't looked at the book, and have no desire to read it, so I don't know how fair those charges are. But really, one could write a huge book about Hillary and all the ways the world has treated her unfairly -- to her advantage as well as to her detriment. Frank, too, tells us more about his own focus on populism, although this seems likely to be a fair summary:

    She seems to have been almost totally unprepared for the outburst of populist anger that characterized 2016, an outburst that came under half a dozen different guises: trade, outsourcing, immigration, opiates, deindustrialization, and the recent spectacle of Wall Street criminals getting bailed out. It wasn't the issues that mattered so much as the outrage, and Donald Trump put himself in front of it. Clinton couldn't.

    To her credit, and unlike many of her most fervent supporters, Hillary Clinton doesn't deny that this web of class-related problems had some role in her downfall. When she isn't repeating self-help bromides or calumniating the Russians she can be found wondering why so many working-class people have deserted the Democratic party.

    This is an important question, and in dealing with it Clinton writes a few really memorable passages, like her description of a grotesque campaign stop in West Virginia where she was protested by a crowd that included the former CEO of the company that owned the Upper Big Branch mine, where 29 coal miners died in 2010.

    But by and large, Clinton's efforts to understand populism always get short-circuited, probably because taking it seriously might lead one to conclude that working people have a legitimate beef with her and the Democratic party.

    Countless inconvenient items get deleted from her history. She only writes about trade, for example, in the most general terms; Nafta and the TPP never. Her husband's program of bank deregulation is photoshopped out. The names Goldman Sachs and Walmart never come up.

    Besides, to take populism seriously might also mean that Bernie Sanders, who was "outraged about everything," might have had a point, and much of What Happened is dedicated to blasting Sanders for challenging Clinton in the Democratic primaries. Given that he later endorsed her and even campaigned for her, this can only be described as churlish, if not downright dishonest.

    That Clinton might have done well to temper her technocratic style with some populist outrage of her own only dawns on her towards the end of the book, by which point it is too late.

    Not to mention impossible. Hillary Clinton simply cannot escape her satisfied white-collar worldview -- compulsively listing people's academic credentials, hobnobbing with officers from Facebook and Google, and telling readers how she went to Davos in 1998 to announce her philosophy.

    Other posts on Clinton's book:

    • James Fallows: Why Hillary Clinton's Book Is Actually Worth Reading: "It's the rare interesting work by a politician -- and it offers an important critique of the press." Fallows stresses how often Hillary does take responsibility for losing, although when he quotes her, you get this (Fallows' emphasis):

      I don't understand why there's an insatiable demand in many quarters for me to take all the blame for losing the election on my own shoulders and quit talking about Comey, the Russians, fake news, sexism, or anything else. Many in the political media don't want to hear about how those things tipped the election in the final days. They say their beef is that I'm not taking responsibility for my mistakes -- but I have, and I do again throughout this book. Their real problem is that they can't bear to face their own role in helping elect Trump, from providing him free airtime to giving my emails three times more coverage than all the issues affecting people's lives combined.

    • Hadley Freeman: America's vitriol towards Clinton reveals a nation mired in misogyny: But is it really? No doubt there are pockets of misogyny that somehow escaped the women's liberation movement of the 1970s and the growing feminist consciousness which has largely settled into common sense, much as there are pockets of racism left untouched by the 1960s civil rights movement. And clearly, Clinton brings misogynistic slurs to the forefront, if only because those who most hate her lack the imagination to craft anything new -- much as many of those who hated Obama reverted to racist vitriol. On the other hand, had she won -- which she would have if only the constitution's framers put a little more care into how elections work -- we'd be complimenting ourselves for how enlightened we've become (much as we did with Obama's election in 2008). Granted, that Donald Trump, as unreconstructed a racist/sexist as we can imagine these days, sure looks like a setback, but could there be some other reason?

    • Sarah Leonard: What Happened by Hillary Clinton review -- entertainingly mean but essentially wrong-headed: For example:

      It feels tiresome to explain this, but many Americans consider bankers the enemy, and voters wanted her to pick a side. The fact that she couldn't see that reveals a fundamental problem with her politics. And it isn't symbolic -- America's particular form of political corruption is rarely a simple exchange of cash for laws. Instead, as a famous Princeton study has shown, wealthy institutions like banks exercise substantial influence over legislative outcomes through the softer power of lobbying and campaign donations, while average people and their institutions exercise almost none. It is laughable that an American politician would be indignant about her right to accept money from banks. . . .

      She primarily attributes her loss to what she calls "tribal politics" -- a blend of racism, sexism and economic discontent -- and FBI director James Comey's press conference days before the election. She may be right about Comey shifting enough white swing voters to ultimately cost her the race. But Clinton's relationship to populism is more complicated.

      "Tribal" isn't the word I would choose for racism and sexism, but there is something primitive about those traits. However, economic discontent is something quite different, something that only looks quaint and irrational if you're able to make ten years average wages for a single speech to bankers.

    • Sophia A McClennen: The great Hillary Clinton paradox:

      As Clinton blames Sanders for disrupting the party and causing "lasting damage" to her campaign she fails to notice the various advantages she had. From her biased treatment by the DNC to the superdelegates to her $150 million war chest (twice Trump's) to the backing of mega-stars from Bruce Springsteen to Beyoncé to Oprah to her massive list of media endorsements, Clinton had plenty of support. She had more endorsements from newspapers than either Reagan or Obama.

      This brings me back to the paradox. There is no doubt that Trump ran a sexist campaign, but that doesn't mean that the Sanders campaign was sexist too. And there is no doubt that some of those who voted for Trump are sexist, but not all of them are.

      McClennan then cites Emily Ekins: The Five Types of Trump Voters: the type Ekins dubs American Preservationists are closest to the racist/sexist/xenophobic stereotype, but they only number 20% of Trump voters (not that such views don't lap over into other "types"). Still, the "lasting damage" Sanders wrought has an Emperor's New Clothes air: it assumes that no one would have noticed that Hillary wasn't an immaculate progressive if only Sanders hadn't pointed out her shortcomings. There is some truth to this: I, for instance, had early on resigned myself to her inevitability, mostly because I thought that she alone among Democrats could raise the sort of money necessary to compete with the Kochs. Obviously, her fundraising prowess came at a cost, which had been painfully evident over the last four Democratic presidential terms, but it wasn't hard to imagine how much worse any name Republican would be. Sanders changed my calculus, not by telling me anything I didn't already know about Clinton, but simply by offering better policies, and backing them up with a credible history of integrity that Clinton lacked.

      Still, this raises an interesting question: if Clinton actually thought that Sanders had undermined her in the primaries, why didn't she make a more dramatic effort to heal the chasm, specifically by making Sanders her running mate? Granted, she did give up some ground on the platform, but personnel is a more serious predictor of policy than campaign platitudes. It wouldn't have been an unusual move, and Sanders would have been an asset to the campaign (unlike Tim Kaine, who at best helped a little in Virginia). Like Gore in 2000 when he picked Joe Lieberman, and like Bill Clinton in 1992 when he picked Gore, Hillary signaled with her VP pick that she was going to go her own way, paying no heed and owing no debts to the "democratic wing of the Democratic Party." So, again like Gore, she now finds herself blaming the left for her own campaign's shortfall after her bad bet that there were more money and votes to be had by snubbing the left than by embracing it.

      McClennan also wrote: A tale of two leaders of the left: New books by Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton emphasize their differences.

    • Jeff Spross: This Hillary Clinton would've won: Specifically, this hinges on the book's revelation that Hillary considered pushing for a Universal Basic Income (UBI) scheme.

    • David Roberts: Hillary Clinton's "coal gaffe" is a microcosm of her twisted treatment by the media: Even more than her "basket of deplorables" comment, Hillary singles her taken-out-of-context "We're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business" as the one comment she regrets most. Still, had the media put the one line in its actual context (even just its paragraph), and noted that Clinton was proposing a $30 billion plan to help communities hit by the declining coal market rebuild their economies, her comment may not have been interesting, but shouldn't have been crippling. Still, the media, prodded by right-wing agitators, made it so:

      There is one and only one reason to pluck out that sentence and make a story of it: to try to hurt Clinton politically by lying about her meaning and intentions. . . .

      From the media's perspective, "Clinton garbled a sentence" is true but not particularly newsworthy. "Clinton boasted about putting coal miners out of work" is false but definitely newsworthy (and damaging to Clinton) if it were true. In other words, there's no honest reason to make this "gaffe" a story at all. . . .

      Right-wing operatives and media figures watch Clinton intensely. Anything she says or does that can be plausibly (or implausibly) spun to appear maleficent, they spin. A vast echo chamber of blogs, "news" sites, radio stations, cable news shows, and Facebook groups takes each one of these mini faux scandals and amplifies the signal.

      If one of the faux scandals catches on enough and dominates right-wing media long enough, then a kind of alchemy occurs. The question facing mainstream outlets is not, "Why aren't you writing about what Clinton said?" That question is easy to answer: It's a nothingburger. The question becomes, "Why aren't you writing about the scandal over what Clinton said?"

      Reputable mainstream journalists don't have to pretend that Clinton meant the ridiculous thing right-wing media says she meant. They can just report that "some interpreted Clinton to mean [ridiculous thing]," and hey, that's technically true. The fact that a bunch of right-wing political and media hacks feigned outrage becomes the story.

    • Jon Schwarz: Hillary Clinton Doesn't Understand Why the Corporate Media Is So Bad:

      Then there's Clinton's peculiar affection for the New York Times. Yes, she says, it has often viewed her "with hostility and skepticism," but "I've read the Times for more than 40 years and still look forward to it every day. I appreciate much of the paper's terrific non-Clinton reporting." . . .

      Since Clinton has no structural critique of the press, why does she believe she was so badly mauled in 2016? The only explanation she presents is that the rules are different for her personally. . . .

      In the end, Clinton's ideas about the media demonstrate that, more than anything, she badly needed to watch the Noam Chomsky documentary "Manufacturing Consent" or get a subscription to the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting newsletter. Then she could have approached her campaign with fewer illusions, and with a much greater chance of winning.

      Instead, she's left with the bitter observation that the press "want me to stop talking. If it's all my fault, then the media doesn't need to do any soul searching." But that's the whole point: The corporate media doesn't have a soul. It just has a balance sheet.

    • Jeffrey St. Clair: Hillary Happened: The late Alexander Cockburn's Mini-Me, better known recently for his virulent, supposedly left-wing attacks on Bernie Sanders, manages to save some bile for Hillary and her book, occasionally managing to be witty -- to no small part because Hillary's never looked much good from the left, even against the vile backdrop of attacks from the right. Favorite line: "Clinton was miscast from the beginning as a political candidate for elected office. Her skills and temperament were more suited to the role of political enforcer in the mode of Thomas Cromwell or John Ehrlichman."

    • Rebecca Traister: Hillary Clinton Is Finally Expressing Some Righteous Anger. Why Does That Make Everyone Else So Mad?

      People have been reacting with atavistic censure to Hillary Clinton for decades, and she's been expected to simply absorb it all without returning fire. There are shirts, as she writes in What Happened, that feature an image of Trump holding her bloody severed head aloft; others, which she doesn't mention, read "Hillary Sucks, But Not Like Monica."

      You can disagree with Clinton; you can reasonably acknowledge that some of her pique does sound defensive. But she's not lying; she's not inciting violence. She's not freaking out about crowd size or claiming that antifa protesters are as bad as neo-Nazis or suggesting that protesters be taken away on stretchers.

    • Shea Wong: Let's talk for a second about #ImWithHer . . .: I was steered to this twitter thread by Robert Christgau (via DailyKos), who tweeted:

      Hillary haters owe it to history and their own integrity to read this. She's not perfect. You're totally fucked up.

      I'm not sure Bob would count me among the "Hillary haters" -- I voted against her in two caucuses, but voted for her against Trump, and didn't consider any of those choices to be close calls. To say "she's not perfect" omits volumes of serious detail -- although nothing I couldn't personally overlook compared to Trump. On the other hand, I do know people who swear they'd never vote for her -- not that any of them hated her enough to vote for Trump. Still, I take offense that they, let alone we, are "totally fucked up." They are, for starters, people who can be counted on to oppose senseless, fruitless wars that Hillary has always been eager to support -- and that one might reasonably expect her to start in the future. I don't agree with their voting decision, but I have to respect them: at the end of the day, they're comrades, while Hillary skews somewhere between "lesser evil" and "lesser good." Still, I'm open to reading something that makes a case for her -- indeed, many of the reviews I've cited in this section give her credit. But this thread is something quite different. This isn't "excellent" (as hpg put it), or enlightening, or even coherent, and I have to wonder about sane. Obviously much of problem is twitter, both for chunking and for the nine distracting and irrelevant videos Wong inserted. As best I can discern, Wong's rant boils down to two salient points: Hillary was the victim of a vile and unrelenting torrent of misogynistic smears, and that was mostly the fault of Bernie and the left ("We watched progbros parrot trump talking points, and vice versa, to the point if you covered avatar/bio you couldn't tell the difference"). Wong then concludes: "If she could be torn down that easily. So could any of us." I'm not sure Wong is right even on the first point. By far the most effective attack was the "Crooked Hillary" meme. One might dispute this, especially in comparison to Trump, but it has nothing to do with her gender. The second point is certainly false, running opposite to the very principles that define the left, and continued harping on it by diehard Hillary fans reeks of old-fashioned liberal red baiting.

  • Josh Marshall: More Thoughts on the Intra-Democratic Divide: Meant as a follow-up to his commentary on Ta-Nehisi Coates' The First White President ( Thoughts on the First White President). To oversimplify a bit, Coates argues that racism remains the fundamental dividing line in American politics, one that cannot be erased by cleverly attempting to fashion a class-based appeal to working class Trump supporters. Marshall looks to have it both ways: agreeing that Coates is right on racism, but still stressing the need to recapture some Trump supporters, probably by appealing to them on economic grounds -- but he kind of makes a muddle out of it. Let's try to clear up this confusion:

    1. "Identity politics" will always be with us: it's the default mode of most voters -- not necessarily just "low information" but it's especially prevalent there. Unless you know better, the safe and sensible vote is to follow the people you identify with -- usually people most like yourself. Everyone does it. I know a good deal more about politicians than most folk, but every now and then I find myself choosing between two people I don't know anything substantial about, so I fall back on my prejudices -- the most common identity there is partisan, and while I don't especially identify with Democrats, I've learned that Republicans are dangerous (and often demented).
    2. Of course, it's just as easy to vote against categories you don't identify with, and political parties have found it efficient to focus on that. The Republican Party was founded on the interests of independent farmers and manufacturers ("vote yourself a homestead, vote yourself a tariff") but given its solid Northern protestant homogeneity soon took to rallying against its opponents, deriding the Democrats as the party of "rum, Romanism and rebellion." In the 1970s, Richard Nixon and the architects of The Emerging Republican Majority saw an opportunity to expand the party's base to pick up two major blocks of white Democrats: protestants in the South and catholics (mostly) in the North. They used coded appeals to racism, but wrapped them up with God and guns and sheer avarice into a package that was very flattering to their targets, and repulsive to the groups they rallied against. The latter had little choice but to align with the Democrats, even if it wasn't clear what they were supporting. The key point here is that the Democrats didn't deliberately build their recent coalition: as with their late-nineteenth-century coalition, they got the odds and ends after the Republicans had seized the middle ground.
    3. In both centuries, it appeared as though Republican efforts to rally its chosen people against the margins was destined to run against demographic trends -- mostly driven by immigration. Republican identity politics found its greatest success in the 1920s, with prohibition and a hard turn against immigration. In recent years, some Democratic Party strategists have started to flirt with their own identity politics, calculating that the groups the Republicans have left them with will grow into a new Democratic majority. This idea is attractive to Democratic Party elites because it lets them think they can bank on winning votes without having to offer the voters tangible value.
    4. As usual, the Republicans have been on the leading edge of this dynamic. As Thomas Frank pointed out in What's the Matter With Kansas?, Republican elites had constructed a scam where the base would vote for causes they were passionate about (guns, anti-abortion, anti-immigrant) but all elected Republicans would do is to cater to their donor class. Since Frank wrote, the GOP has seen an upheaval as the base have forced their concerns onto the party agenda. Nowhere has this been more drmatic, much to our detriment, than here in Kansas. As Frank pointed out in Listen, Liberal, the same elite/mass split exists in the Democratic Party -- it's easy to note Democratic governors and majors who are every bit as deep in donor pockets as the most corrupt Republicans (e.g., Andrew Cuomo and Rahm Emmanuel). And indeed, what we saw in 2016 was a rank-and-file revolt against the elites of both parties -- unsuccessful, sure, because Clinton was still able to keep enough Democrats in line, and because Trump was a fraud, but both served notice that the gap between what parties run on and what they try to deliver needs to close.
    5. Republican identity politics never recognized as such because the white protestants (and later catholics) that made up their core were so ubiquitous -- until recently, when they've become minorities in many urban areas, including the nation's most booming economies. This added a sense of fear, urgency, and despair to the Trump vote, and the result was a small but significant shift in the white vote against the Democrats, especially away from the coasts. Democrats are divided on this: some argue that Democrats should focus more on class (economics, inequality) to broaden their base to bring back some of those white voters; others regard the white voters as lost causes, atavisms, who will fade away as the nation becomes ever more urban and globalized. Some of the former have characterized the latter as "engaging in identity politics" -- this strikes me as misguided and self-destructive.
    6. At this point we can dispense with the Republicans, aside from noting that Republican rule invariably ends not from demographic misjudgments but from corruption and disastrous economic crashes that (temporarily anyhow) expose the folly of their pro-business ideology -- on the other hand, Democratic rule usually ends when people get a sense of recovery and stability, and grow reckless and fickle again.
    7. The Democratic Party is divided today, with the emergence of a faction which focuses on reducing inequality and securing real economic gains for the vast majority of the American people, and another which caters to wealthy urban liberals and promises to somehow protect various targets from vicious Republican attacks. The former still lack power in the party, although their grass roots visibility has grown significantly over the past year. The latter still has their rich donor base and a grip on the levers of party power, but they also have a track record of failure -- most embarrassingly to Trump in 2016. It is unlikely that this divide will heal soon, but they do have dangerous enemies in common -- which should help focus the mind.
    8. I am getting to where I have very little patience for the still-prevalent internecine sniping between these camps. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't argue about important matters of policy, like the tendency of the Clinton and Obama admins to undermine unions, to promote job-killing trade deals, to allow financiers to take over our industries and run them to ground, to increase mass incarceration, to allow the national security state to withdraw ever further from the purview of the people they're supposed to serve -- and one should add the global war on anything that affronts American egos, which is an issue that even Bernie Sanders has treated as a sort of "third rail."
    9. Whereas Republicans can at least make short-term gains merely by cranking up the volume of their social polarization, Democrats have to respond rationally and systematically. First thing they (especially the elites) need to do is to shift their program to emphasize a tangible return to the people they expect and hope will vote for them -- even if that means becoming less responsive to their donors. Second, they need to make the donors realize that the viability of the party depends on the party delivering benefits to its base -- and in fact that the country as a whole would gain by forging a more equitable economy and society. And third, those who wish to appeal to the more white workers need to convince them that they cannot prosper without helping everyone -- that Republican demagoguery offers them nothing but ruin, and that only the Democrats are offering them a hand up.

  • Josh Marshall: The Real Problem With Equifax:

    It now seems clear that the massive data breach at Equifax was caused not simply by aggressive hackers but by clear and potentially negligent security errors by Equifax itself. But fundamentally, this isn't a security problem. It's a market failure and a legal and regulatory failure. . . .

    In some cases consumers would rebel. That would solve the problem. But that's actually a key part of the problem: consumers aren't Equifax's customers. They're the product. You're the product. Banks and other lenders like credit agencies because they offer a systematized and standardized way of evaluating risk. The banks are the customers. Credit rating agencies would prefer never to deal with consumers at all. They only do so when forced to or, more recently, as they've developed a secondary business in selling consumers services to help them protect themselves against errors or security breaches by credit rating agencies.

  • Bill McKibben: Stop talking right now about the threat of climate change. It's here; it's happening: Massive hurricanes, record high temperatures and wildfires on the west coast, drought in North Dakota -- and that's just seven days in the US. Other related links:

  • Matthew Yglesias: The 4 most important stories in politics this week: Senate Republicans threw an Obamacare repeal Hail Mary: Senators Cassidy and Graham proposed repealing ACA and replacing it with that old standby: block grants to the states; DREAMer deal: Trump's over-dinner deal with Shumer/Pelosi; Berniecare: kiss-of-death label for Sanders' "Medicare for All" bill; Tax reform is coming soon, maybe. Other Yglesias pieces this week (skipping the ones on Apple's product announcements, which would only be of interest if they explained the predatory nature of Apple hype, which they don't): Berniecare leaves enormous discretion to the executive branch; Trump should actually do what he's pretending he'll do on tax reform; The Trump administration's big new anti-leak memo leaked last night; Medicare-for-all is nothing like "repeal and replace"; Donald Trump is making the single-payer push inevitable. I'm not happy Yglesias keeps referring to "Berniecare," but he does offer a pretty fair description of the Republican alternatives:

    Repeal and replace wasn't just a slogan that covered up some internal disagreements. It was a lie. Repeal and replace was an effort to bridge a fundamentally unbridgeable gap between the American people's complaints about the ACA -- premiums, deductibles, and copayments that were too high -- and the Republican Party donor class's complaints about the ACA: that it levied too much in taxes. This left Republican legislators not just with some difficult trade-offs to grapple with, but with the difficult question of how to break the news to the American people that the outcome of their legislation was going to bear no resemblance whatsoever to what had been promised.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, September 10, 2017

Weekend Roundup

Back in 2001, I knew that most of my friends in New York didn't like Mayor Rudy Giuliani, but I couldn't tell you why. (Well, I had heard about his stop-and-frisk policies, but that hadn't really sunk in.) I was visiting a friend, Liz Fink, in Brooklyn on 9/11, so I wound up spending a lot of time over the next week watching Giuliani, and I noticed something interesting. At every press conference, Giuliani managed to convey the right tones: sympathy, concern, dedication, and competent management in the face of crisis. He was, in short, both a professional and a human being -- a stark contrast to most of the country's politicians (most memorably GW Bush and Hillary Clinton), who had nothing tangible to do so they spent all of their time posturing. Even Liz granted my point. Of course, Giuliani's spell didn't last. After the immediate crisis waned, he started reading his press. It swelled his head, and he turned (returned?) to being an asshole, but it was interesting to watch at the time.

Hurricanes Harvey and Irma have given some other Republicans the opportunity to put their vicious ideological programs aside and come out as human beings. Governors Greg Abbott and Rick Scott seem to have mostly passed that test. Donald Trump failed, painfully and pathetically. (If you doubt me, read Josh Marshall: He Can't Even Fake It.) But even he managed to have one decent moment this week: he negotiated a deal with the Democratic leadership in Congress to pass $15.3 billion in aid to rebuild after Harvey, and to extend the federal debt ceiling to allow that money to be spent. Of course, there never was any doubt that Democrats would vote to extend the debt ceiling or to fund disaster relief. Trump needed the deal to bypass the Republican right-flank, with ninety House Republicans opposed. I haven't looked at the vote list, so don't know how many of the curmudgeons hail from Texas or Florida. I didn't see enough of Ted Cruz this week to answer Is Ted Cruz Human? but I understand he no longer thinks the reasons he voted against Sandy aid should apply to Harvey. It might not matter if Trump or Cruz are sociopaths if their politics showed some empathy and concern, but it doesn't -- making their personality defects all the more glaring.

With the Republicans solidly in control of government all across the disaster zone, the one silver lining is that none of them are quoting Ronald Reagan this week, who famously said:

The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.

The fact is that when disaster strikes, no one can be heard saying "the markets are going to fix this in no time." Their first instinct is to look to the government for help, because deep down they understand that in a democratic republic, government belongs to, is accountable to, and works for the people and their general welfare. The old joke is that "there are no atheists in foxholes"; equally so, there are no libertarians in hurricanes. I'm not going to slam anyone for looking to socialize the costs of natural disasters. Rather, I'd argue that socialism would be a good thing, not just for such extraordinary events but for everyday life. And if you only come to realize that now, well, that's better than never.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Ross Barkan: Trump cut a deal with the Democrats. Is a new era upon us? Probably not. Trump takes his policy cues from Fox & Friends, plus whatever Paul Ryan throws his way. In theory he has some in-house experts, but they turn out to be guys like Nick Mulvaney, who lie and con him, then go out and brag about it to the media. Nothing any of them want can get any Democratic support at all -- which given how corrupt Democrats are regarded as being is a pretty astonishing statement -- so he has little option except to depend on the narrow Republican majority, and that is constantly endangered by a right-wing faction that doesn't care what they wreck so long as they can push the party to the right. The Harvey aid/debt ceiling deal worked because Democrats have no desire to do what Republicans did for eight years: sabotaging the government hoping folks would blame Obama. And Trump had to do it because Texas is his turf, because federal disaster aid mostly supports the business class that voted so heavily for him, because letting government spending halt in the middle of a disaster recovery would be insane, and because he couldn't trust Republicans to get the job done. There may be similar cases where sanity dictates that he offer something to get Democrats on board: if he really does want to legitimize DACA, that's a possibility, but it's going to be hard to do any broader immigration legislation without tripping over many red lines. Health care and taxes are other issues where the Republican desire to do something insanely destructive is too great to compromise. The other question is whether Democrats should make a habit of bailing Trump out of his own partisan chasms. Democrats have had a terrible track record with such "grand bargains" in the past, and they should be extra wary now.

  • Bryan Bender: Trump review leans toward proposing mini-nuke: Back around 1950, Robert Oppenheimer was asked why he was opposed to developing "the super" (the hydrogen bomb). His answer was because the targets were too small. In the following decades, ever-larger hydrogen bombs became all the rage, until their wholesale use threatened to cause something called "nuclear winter." At the same time, the US and Russia worked hard on miniaturizing nuclear weapons, producing mini-nukes that could be lobbed by artillery (hoping, like WWI's poison gas, that the wind didn't shift to blow the radiation back on your own troops). The fear about small ("tactical") nuclear weapons has always been that we wouldn't fear them enough to not use them. Precisely this reasoning made them prime targets for arms talks, with Bush I agreeing to remove tactical nukes from Europe and Korea, for the time de-escalating the Cold War. This news is especially alarming because Trump has long seemed to be fascinated with using such weapons: indeed, this article is about a review "which Trump established by executive order his first week in office" -- as if he had nothing better to do.

  • Ta-Nehisi Coates: The First White President: Of course, many other presidents have happened to be white -- a streak that ran up to 41 until Barack Obama was elected in 2008 -- but what makes Trump unique isn't the color of his skin so much as his resolve to restore the office's racial identity, especially by obliterating any trace of Obama: "The fact of a black president seemed to insult Donald Trump personally. He has made the negation of Barack Obama's legacy the foundation of his own." Various things here I'd quibble with -- the paragraph on Mark Lilla's "The End of Identify Liberalism," followed by three on George Packer's "The Unconnected," could support a whole post -- but this is a view that deserves respect. For instance, his overly succinct summary of the last decade:

    When Barack Obama came into office, in 2009, he believed that he could work with "sensible" conservatives by embracing aspects of their policy as his own. Instead he found that his very imprimatur made that impossible. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that the GOP's primary goal was not to find common ground but to make Obama a "one-term president." A health-care plan inspired by Romneycare was, when proposed by Obama, suddenly considered socialist and, not coincidentally, a form of reparations. The first black president found that he was personally toxic to the GOP base. An entire political party was organized around the explicit aim of negating one man. It was thought by Obama and some of his allies that this toxicity was the result of a relentless assault waged by Fox News and right-wing talk radio. Trump's genius was to see that it was something more, that it was a hunger for revanche so strong that a political novice and accused rapist could topple the leadership of one major party and throttle the heavily favored nominee of the other.

    I would add three notes to this: (1) conservatives were never serious about their wonk schemes, which were never more than red herrings meant to distract and derail real reforms; (2) the right-wing would have fought back against any white Democrat elected president in 2008 in much the same terms, although it may have resonated differently (oddly enough, the fact that Americans had elected a black president seemed to loosen some of the political inhibitions against overt racism, encouraging racists to come out into the open -- a trend Trump's election has only increased); (3) the "hunger for revanche" was real but not broad enough to elect Trump; that was only possible because the Democrat was so compromised and reviled, and Republicans were so united in their opportunism.

    Closing paragraph:

    It has long been an axiom among certain black writers and thinkers that while whiteness endangers the bodies of black people in the immediate sense, the larger threat is to white people themselves, the shared country, and even the whole world. There is an impulse to blanch at this sort of grandiosity. When W.E.B. Du Bois claims that slavery was "singularly disastrous for modern civilization" or James Baldwin claims that whites "have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white," the instinct is to cry exaggeration. But there really is no other way to read the presidency of Donald Trump. The first white president in American history is also the most dangerous president -- and he is made more dangerous still by the fact that those charged with analyzing him cannot name his essential nature, because they too are implicated in it.

    The Atlantic's print magazine cover story is "The Trump Presidency: A Damage Report": Jeffrey Goldberg sets the tone: The Autocratic Element: Can America recover from the Trump administration?, interviews David Frum ("The thing I got most wrong is that I did not anticipate the sheer chaos and dysfunction and slovenliness of the Trump operation . . . We'd be in a lot worse shape if he were a more meticulous, serious-minded person."), and introduces pieces by Eliot A. Cohen, Jack Goldsmith, and Coates.

  • Sarah Kliff: This is the most brazen act of Obamacare sabotage yet:

    The Trump administration has let funding for Obamacare's $63 million in-person outreach program lapse, leading to layoffs and confusion among nonprofits that enroll vulnerable populations in coverage. . . .

    The sudden funding halt comes at a critical time for the Affordable Care Act. Navigator groups were just beginning to ramp up outreach for the health law's open enrollment period, which begins November 1. Now, some have done an about-face: They've canceled outreach work and appointments with potential enrollees because they have no budget to cover those costs.

    No outreach should translate into fewer sign-ups, hence more adverse selection in the insured population, which threatens to cut into insurer profits, who will respond by raising prices, demanding more subsidies. Trump will argue that this proves Obamacare is imploding. Kliff also wrote Trump has found another way to undermine Obamacare. Kliff regularly includes links at the bottom to other health care pieces. Notable here is Elana Schor: Chris Murphy's stealthy single-payer pitch. Sen. Murphy is proposing that all individuals and business be able to buy Medicare through the Obamacare exchanges -- i.e., Medicare becomes the "public option," but more notable is that this allows an easy migration from business group plans.

  • Caitlin MacNeal: Haley Says North Korea 'Begging for War': Isn't this what psychologists like to call projection? That's when you attribute your own thoughts to someone else (projecting yourself onto the other person). This happens a lot, especially to people who lack self-awareness, even more so to those who lack respect, empathy, and concern for others, who can't be bothered with even trying to understand them. As a social trait, this sort of thing is annoying, but the misunderstandings it leads to rarely matter. Among the powerful, it can be dangerous, and in this case can lead to nuclear war. Of course, Haley is not the only one in Trump's administration spouting ignorant bluster. Mattis has promised to respond to "any threat" with "massive military response": the problem there is that "any threat" is a very low threshold, especially given that Trump's administration takes such umbrage over North Korea's missile and bomb tests, repeatedly describing them as threats. Most of all there's Trump, with his "hell and fury like never seen before" and "we'll see." Frankly, this is a crisis which wouldn't exist if the US simply ignored it, but having made such a big deal out of missile and bomb tests in the past, they see continued tests as an insult and challenge to their superpower egos -- again, they're projecting their own world-hegemonic ambitions onto another state, one that the US has tried to destroy for 67 years now (not so literally since 1953, more passive-aggressively, but while the conflict drifted in and out of American consciousness, it's always been a pressing fact-of-life in North Korea).

    Several other thoughts here: long ago American presidents generally appointed UN Ambassadors that reflected favorably on the country -- Adlai Stevenson and Andrew Young come to mind -- but at some point that changed, the result being a string of ambassadors whose job seemed to be to display contempt for the UN and the principles it was founded on (Madeline Albright, John Bolton, and Nikki Haley are examples). As this happened, American speeches at the UN ceased being honest attempts to engage with the world and were increasingly focused for domestic political consumption. Although several others have had notable politican careers, Haley is relatively unique in the baldness of her political ambitions -- indeed, one suspects that she came up with the idea of campaigning for the post by watching House of Cards, where First Lady Claire Underwood (Robin Wright) hopes to launch her own political career by getting her husband to nominate her for UN Ambassador.

    Some more pieces on North Korea:

    • Andrew J Bacevich: Seven Steps to a Saner US Policy Towards North Korea: A few quibbles, though. First, I don't see this, even with his later carve-out "apart from Fox and a handful of outliers": "The national media is obsessed with Trump and is determined to bring him down." Obsessed maybe: he's a buffoon and a public menace, which makes him news/entertainment-worthy, and they certainly love that, but I don't see the media pressuring or panicking Trump into starting a war. I also think he overestimates the value of deterrence and ignores the desperation induced by ever-tightening sanctions. The greatest risk is becoming too successful at boxing North Korea in, leaving them with no alternatives.

    • Robert Parry: How 'Regime Change' Wars Led to Korea Crisis: Specifically Iraq and Libya, which were wars the US felt safe to pursue because neither target had sufficient power -- atom bombs and the missiles to deliver them -- to deter US aggression. But more generally, from WWII on, the US goal in war has always been to unconditionally destroy its enemies and replace them with new states subverient to America.

    • Jacob G Hornberger: Sanctions Are an Act of War: I'd qualify this by saying that certain limited sanctions, like the BDS campaigns against South Africa and Israel, are a useful means of highlighting deplorable behavior without even suggesting the threat of war. On the other hand, US sanctions against North Korea, Cuba, Iran, and several others were clearly meant as low-intensity proxies of war, backed up by threat of destruction and designed in such a way that the targets may find no recourse. South Africa, for instance, was able to escape sanctions by allowing free and democratic elections, and lifting the sanctions did not depend on the result.

    • Ariane Tabatabai: What the Iran Deal Can Teach America About North Korea: "If credibility depends in part on a country's willingness to follow through on military threats, surely it also depends on whether it abides by diplomatic commitments." It seems pretty obvious that Obama's Iran Deal could serve as a model for North Korea: both are countries long isolated, marginalized, and threatened by the US, and both decided to defend themselves by developing nuclear power and missile technology into a deterrent against American attack; in both cases the US responded with sanctions and even graver threats. With Iran, this was resolved diplomatically, and there seems little reason why the same couldn't be done with North Korea (in fact, the same dispute flared up in the 1990s and was resolved by Jimmy Carter, acting independent of the Clinton administration; Carter's agreement was accepted by Clinton, but broke down as the US, especially under GW Bush, failed to keep its end of the deal, resulting in North Korea restarting its nuclear program). Unfortunately, Trump seems committed to scuttling the Iran deal, learning nothing from it. If he does so, he will signal to North Korea that the US cannot be trusted to follow through with its diplomatic commitments. Indeed, the US decision to attack Libya after it had agreed to dismantle its own nuclear program has already been noted by North Korea's leaders.

  • Sophia A McClennen: A tale of two leaders of the left: New books by Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton emphasize their differences: Clinton finally finished her campaign memoir, What Happened; Sanders published his memoir Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In before 2016 expired, and now has a slimmed-down primer, Bernie Sanders' Guide to Political Revolution.

    The contrast between high priced VIP tickets to an event for a memoir about losing the election and a down-to-earth how-to guide for progressive politics aimed at young readers offers us clear evidence of the vastly different ways that Clinton and Sanders see their roles as national leaders.

    Sanders is looking forward and Clinton is looking back. Sanders is engaging the young and working to build momentum for his progressive agenda. Clinton is naming names, bristling at her unfair loss and cashing in. . . .

    And, while Clinton mocks Sanders for his idealistic desire to think big, Sanders starts his book reminding readers that his views are those of the bulk of Americans: "On major issue after major issue, the vast majority of Americans support a progressive agenda." For Clinton, though, the progressive agenda wanted by the majority is nothing more than the hocus pocus of magic abs or the dreams of those who want a pony. . . . She literally sees political vision as nothing but a fantasy. She has so thoroughly imbibed the corporatist, pro-status quo version of the Democratic party that she can't even notice how pathetically uninspiring her positions are for those young voters she referred to as basement dwellers on the campaign trail.

    Against the snarky, negative tone of Clinton's book, Sanders offers his readers a combination of political passion and practical advice. When it refers to him personally, it does so by quoting a Sanders tweet that links to the issue being covered. The tweets are used to show how Sanders has been standing up for these issues for years. It is a technique that privileges the cause, not the ego.

    This is one thing that separates Sanders from the political pack. I was talking to my cousin last week and she complained that with Elizabeth Warren it's always "I'll fight for you," somehow making the it all about her. She noted that Sanders wasn't like that, nor was Obama. None of us mentioned Clinton. Some things are too obvious to speak of.

  • Michael Paarlberg: Why Verrit, a pro-Clinton media platform, is doomed to fail: "The website has been blasted for its unsubtle propaganda. There is a reason it works for Republicans and not Democrats."

    Brainchild of Clinton hyper-loyalist Peter Daou, the "media venture for the 65.8 million" (referring to Clinton's popular vote tally) offers up treacly quotes and random factoids, readymade for social media and "verified" by the site, so that you can be sure Clinton really did say "America is once again at a moment of reckoning."

    Within days, it won the endorsement of Madame Secretary herself and the mockery of everyone else, due in part to its founder's fondness for all caps and getting in fights on Twitter. . . .

    Thus there's far less appetite among Democrats for the type of unsubtle propaganda that Verrit traffics. One can see it in the way Fox News trounces MSNBC in viewership: Republicans see Fox as the only news source they can trust in media landscape that does not align with their values. Democrats would rather just read the New York Times. . . .

    In theory, Democrats could be open to more ideological conflict, now that they are shut out of all three branches of government, the majority of statehouses, and have little to lose. And a smarter media outlet might be able to tap into that demand. But it would be one catering to a very different party than the Democrats currently are, one that sees itself as a social movement, with a broader vision for how the world should look, and a willingness to use media as a blunt instrument to get there. One that looks curiously like what Clinton's main rival for the nomination was pushing.

    But if there's one group that Daou hates more than Republicans, it's Bernie Sanders supporters.

    I followed Daou's blog for a while, citing him once in 2006, then maybe a dozen times in 2010-12, but I wasn't aware that he worked for Clinton in 2008, and haven't noticed him since 2012. I wouldn't have expected him as a "Hillary superfan," but clearly she does have some kind of cult (cf. Abby Ohlheiser: Inside the huge, 'secret' Facebook group for Hillary Clinton's biggest fans; Ohlheiser also got stuck with investigating Verrit, here: What even is Verrit, the news source endorsed by Hillary Clinton?), and the timing here coincides with Clinton's campaign memoir, which evidently features a number of attempts to blame Bernie for her loss. All of this is happening at a time when there are literally hundreds of stories each week about how Trump and the Republicans are scheming and acting against the majority of Americans: you'd think that would be reason enough to bury the hatchet and unite Hillary and Bernie supporters, but Daou seems more intent on smearing Bernie than on resisting Trump (see Who's Paying Peter Daou to Smear Bernie Sanders and the Left?). I wouldn't discount the power of money here, but I'll also note that it's pretty much inevitable that centrists will spend more of their time attacking and distancing themselves from the left, because that's how they curry favor with their well-to-do patrons. For another view: Jack Shafer: This Pro-Hillary Website Looks Like North Korea Agitprop.

  • Matthew Yglesias: The 4 stories that defined the week, explained: Hurricane Irma battered the Caribbean; Donald Trump ended DACA; Donald Trump changed his tune on DACA; Democrats stuck a deal with the White House. Other Yglesias links: The debt ceiling deal is a template for how Trump can get things done; Trump is souring on his top economic aide for the worst possible reason ("Gary Cohn is too tough on Nazis"); 5 different things people mean when they say we need to revive antitrust -- more like different aspects of the general problem of concentrating corporate power; Stanley Fischer announces resignation, opening yet another Fed vacancy for Trump ("good news for people who like risky banking"); Trump's arguments on DACA contradict his position on the travel ban; Trump isn't delivering his own DACA policy because he's cowardly and weak; The looming fight over "tax reform," explained ("in the end, it's about a tax cut for the rich"); The case for immigration ("America's openness to people who want to move here and make a better life for themselves is fuel for that greatness" -- how ironical, or dumb, does that make a anti-immigrant politician so obsessed with the nation's greatness?); Seattle should make a pitch to be Amazon's 2nd headquarters -- this skirts the real issue of why Amazon needs a second corporate headquarters in these times when every company is looking to make management leaner (and meaner), though he does offer this:

    And from the company's point of view, the best part is that it will also set off an irresistible race to the bottom as cities compete to shower subsidies on the company in hopes of luring the proposed 50,000 jobs spread across 8 million square feet of offices at an average compensation of $100,000 a piece.

    I'd like to see federal legislation to make it illegal (or at least prohibitive) for states and local entities to bid for corporate favors. Boeing, in particular, has engaged in this peculiar combination of bribery and extortion so regularly you'd think they had decided that their "core competency" was political influence peddling, not airframes. This process damages losing states and cities without notably helping the winning bidders.

    The "Case for Immigration" piece is long and covers a lot of good points. I suspect one could construct a counter-argument, a "Case Against Immigration," but it couldn't argue for economic growth -- indeed, it would try to make a virtue out of conservation that can only be achieved with zero or negative growth -- and it certainly wouldn't bruit the word "greatness" anywhere. Indeed, it would call for dismantling America's world hegemony, which both pushes and pulls immigration.

Took a quick look at some Hurricane Irma news before posting. The storm is moving north at about 14 mph, so its crawl up Florida's Gulf Coast is pretty slow. I saw some live broadcasts while the eye was over Naples about 6PM EST, and I've seen some later video showing Naples pretty severely flooded. I suppose it's good that the eye has moved inland: almost straight north through Fort Myers to about 35 miles east of Sarasota at 10PM EST, but the current forecast track has it shifting northwest to pass straight through Tampa, then briefly out to sea before landing again west of Ocala. It should weaken faster over land, regenerate some over water, but the storm is so large it's producing storm surges and tropical-storm-force winds along the east coast as well as the west. Looks like it will move into Georgia around 2PM Monday, and Tennessee 2PM Tuesday, stalling there and dumping a lot of rain.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, September 3, 2017

Weekend Roundup

At some point I need to write about the book I just finished, Rosa Brooks' How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales From the Pentagon (2016; paperback, 2017, Simon & Schuster). I didn't bother with this when it came out in hardcover last year, but I noticed the paperback about the time Gen. Kelly replaced Reince Priebus, which got me to wondering what is was people see in flag officers that makes them seem to be uniquely capable functionaries. This mindset seems to be especially widespread on the right, though perhaps by default as their more fundamental belief is that all other bureaucrats are incapable of doing anything worthwhile, or perhaps they mean just up to no good. Still, liberals have grown increasingly fond of brass, and politicians of all stripes trip all over themselves in prostrating themselves to America's sainted heroes.

Unfortunately, while Brooks sometimes gets caught up in such idolatry, she never offers much elucidation. The closest she comes is to point out that the military has increasingly tended to take over functions that previously belonged to the State Department because the military has so much more money to work with. Even that gets very little analysis beyond the "day everything changed" 9/11 cliché. But the disturbing thing about 9/11 wasn't what changed then but what had changed sometime earlier. The objective facts of 9/11 meant we should at least have considered the option of responding to crimes through law enforcement (FBI and Interpol, maybe drawing on "intelligence" from CIA and NSA) as opposed to declaring war and sending the military to invade distant countries. Clearly, Brooks' title described something real: in the mindsets of the Bush administration, and evidently with the Clintons before, and possibly much further back, the default worldview of America's politicians had become militarized. So how, and why, had that happened? Brooks doesn't tell us.

Well, she does provide a couple of hints, starting with a critique of "metaphorical wars" -- basically, political campaigns that attempted to recruit the sort of public unity and support, including self-sacrifice, that WWII had achieved: the "war on poverty" and "war on drugs" perhaps the most famous examples, with cancer, crime, AIDS, and terror getting various degrees of attention. Even going back to the 1950s, something as basic and benign as building interstate highways could only make it through Congress if rationalized as national defense. Brooks provides other examples where people (businesses and non-profits as well as politicians) tried selling us things by invoking the military -- e.g., we were told that obesity is bad because it reduces the recruitment pool of possible soldiers. What she doesn't seem to notice is that every one of these conceptualizations failed, often because they were laughably stupid, more so because they were inappropriate and misguided, and I suspect ultimately because, regardless of what you might think WWII proved, war never really accomplishes its original goals nor redeems its initial reasoning.

I've tried to formulate this before, and Brooks has only, albeit inadvertently, increase my conviction. The first thing to understand about war is that you lose the moment it begins. Arguably, you may cause the other side to lose more than you do, but the misfortune of others never compensates for your own losses, especially what the experience of war does to your own psyche. The second thing is that war isn't "an extension of politics by other means" but the abject failure of politics to resolve potential conflicts short of war.

Brooks spends much of her book delving into anthropology, trying to convince herself that war is a constant, inevitable feature of humanity, even though she'd like to subject it to a system of law to manage it better, to limit some of the atrocities that seem to mess up so many wars. Her big innovation here is to push the idea that war/peace represent a continuum with many intermediate "gray" areas as opposed to the dichotomy or negation we are used to thinking in terms of. Here's a sample quote (pp. 353-354):

What would it mean, in practice, to manage this churning, changing "space between" -- to develop laws, politics, and institutions premised on the assumption that we will forever remain unable to draw sharp boundaries between war and peace, and that we will frequently find ourselves in the space between?

This will be the work of many minds and many years. But the task is surely not impossible if we remind ourselves that we human beings can make and unmake categories and rules. And it is surely not inconsistent with the core principles enshrined both in America's founding documents and in human rights law: that life and liberty are unalienable rights, that no person should be arbitrarily deprived of these rights, and that no one -- no individual, no organization, no government, and no state -- should be permitted to exercise power without being held accountable for mistakes or abuses.

If we take these principles seriously, we might, for instance, develop better mechanisms to prevent arbitrariness, mistake, and abuse in targeted killings.

Thus she inches up to the edge of a chasm, then plunges in. Why isn't it obvious that "if we take these principles seriously" we wouldn't be doing any "targeted killings"? All you have to do is to reverse the case examples to see that the problem is the idea of targeted killing, not the likelihood of "arbitrariness, mistake, and abuse." In larger terms, the problem isn't that war is very probably compounded by all manner of mistake and abuse, but that war is practiced at all. After all, what is war but an elaborate moral charade meant to justify all sorts of slaughter and havoc? -- things that are sensibly prohibited under law in the domain of peace. And isn't Brooks' campaign to map out gray areas just a ruse for allowing war (and the military) to seep into civil society, spoiling peace?

One odd thing here is that while Brooks seems to be a big fan of international laws which prohibit many common practices of war and which promote broad notions of human rights, she doesn't seem to grasp that the intention behind those laws is to outlaw war. Moreover, that very point is obvious to the conservatives, nationalists, and militarists who instinctively reject such international law -- and at least in the former case, any notion of human rights based on equality. Way back in 1945 when the UN was founded, it was at least an aspirational goal of the liberals who then ran the US government to prevent future wars by establishing a mutually acceptable creed of equal rights for nations and for people within nations. Obviously, the real nations of the time had some work to do to achieve those aspirations, but at least they pretty much all recognized the need to avoid a repeat (or escalation) of the just-concluding world war. And they understood that by putting their best ideals forward, they could inspire one another to do better. However, since that date, many Americans, including virtual all working politicians, have discarded those ideals and instead embraced the US military -- its power to terrify and cower the rest of the world -- as the root of their security, and therefore their sense of justice.

I'm not really sure why that happened, but certainly the seeds were all present before the end of the Korean War (1953). Part of it was that many Americans found WWII to be exhilarating, the source both of community and prosperity. Part was the hatchet job done on the working class by the Red Scare and the Cold War. (Conveniently, many American workers were temporarily shielded by anti-communist unions, but we all know how that eventually turned out.) Part was the way we fought the Cold War, especially by embracing right-wing dictators against their own people. One thing America's emerging militarism cannot be blamed on was actual wartime successes by the US military: Korea was a bloody stalemate; Vietnam an unequivocal loss; Iraq an expensive, tainted and temporary technical win; Afghanistan not even that. Sure, the Soviet Union folded, but the nations we struggled hardest against have proven the most resistant to our hegemony -- notably including Russia. All the while, the US has sunk to the bottom of the list of "rich nations" in every measure of widespread prosperity -- something we should blame on extravagant military budgets and the right-wing political factions which benefit from continuous hostility and war.

It's probably unfair to blame all of this on Brooks and the liberal hawks of her generation -- the lawyers and policy wonks who felt so much shame over inaction in Rwanda and who counted Bosnia and Kosovo as big successes for a military juggernaut they idealized and came to love (Brooks actually marrying a Green Beret). It is especially sad that Brooks fell for this con, given that her mother (Barbara Ehrenreich) is one of the most incisive social and political critics of our time -- one who, among many other things, wrote her own insightful anthropology of war, the 1997 book Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War. The difference was that Ehrenreich strove to raise myths and primeval emotions to a level of consciousness, where we could rationally encounter them and consciously change. Brooks does the opposite, starting with reason and remythologizing it, turning war from a conscious option back into a quasi-religious belief.

Well, that's the gist of what I wanted to say. Someone should write a big book on how and why American political figures lost their faith and interest in international cooperation, law, justice, and peace. When I searched for "america turns against international law" the first piece that came up was from 2015: Alfred W McCoy: You Must Follow International Law (Unless You're American). It's not as if no one notices American contempt for international law, but it's so ensconced it's hardly even an issue for politicians here. At most it's a nuisance, an inconsequential way other people have of insulting us. The serious question of how this attitude limits our options in dealing with the world never seems to come up.

So I guess the best thing about Brooks' book is the title. Too bad she didn't write a better book on its subject.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Michael Arria: In Attacking Overtime Pay, Trump Is Hurting His Biggest Fans: In his campaign to make sure no good deed is allowed to stand, Trump continues to reverse Obama-era regulations, especially where they limit his favorite business interests:

    In 1975, Gerald Ford set the income threshold above which employees could be exempt from overtime to around $58,000 in today's dollars, but this number was never updated to reflect inflation or wage growth. That means the number is now $23,660. In May 2016 Obama announced that he was doubling the annual salary threshold to $47,476, effectively giving millions of salaried employees making less than that a raise. Obama's move was hardly radical. In fact, it wasn't even as progressive as Ford's. The new rule would have covered 34 percent of full-time salaried workers in the United States; in the 1970s, 50 percent of them were covered. Nonetheless, according to the Department of Labor (DOL), it was poised to raise wages for an estimated 4.2 million workers.

    More: Helaine Olen: The Rollback of Pro-Worker Policies Since Trump Took Office Is Staggering.

  • Eric Holthaus: Harvey Is What Climate Change Looks Like:

    Houston has been sprawling out into the swamp for decades, largely unplanned and unzoned. Now, all that pavement has transformed the bayous into surging torrents and shunted Harvey's floodwaters toward homes and businesses. Individually, each of these subdivisions or strip malls might have seemed like a good idea at the time, but in aggregate, they've converted the metro area into a flood factory. Houston, as it was before Harvey, will never be the same again.

    Harvey is the third 500-year flood to hit the Houston area in the past three years, but Harvey is in a class by itself. By the time the storm leaves the region on Wednesday, an estimated 40 to 60 inches of rain will have fallen on parts of Houston. So much rain has fallen already that the National Weather Service had to add additional colors to its maps to account for the extreme totals. . . .

    Climate change is making rainstorms everywhere worse, but particularly on the Gulf Coast. Since the 1950s, Houston has seen a 167 percent increase in the frequency of the most intense downpours. Climate scientist Kevin Trenberth thinks that as much as 30 percent of the rainfall from Harvey is attributable to human-caused global warming. That means Harvey is a storm decades in the making.

    While Harvey's rains are unique in U.S. history, heavy rainstorms are increasing in frequency and intensity worldwide. One recent study showed that by mid-century, up to 450 million people worldwide will be exposed to a doubling of flood frequency. This isn't just a Houston problem. This is happening all over. A warmer atmosphere enhances evaporation rates and increases the carrying capacity of rainstorms. Harvey drew its energy from a warmer-than-usual Gulf of Mexico, which will only grow warmer in the decades to come.

    Other links on Texas, Hurricane Harvey, and related issues:

  • Hank Johnson: President Trump is giving police forces weapons of war. This is dangerous: "The president has signed an executive order that will reopen the floodgates of military-grade weaponry entering American streets." Again, Trump is reversing an Obama executive order from 2015 -- not sure when the surplus program began, but it had already caused a lot of problems. Coming shortly after a Trump speech encouraging local police to abuse prisoners, Trump's "many sides" reaction to Charlottesville, and his pardon of Arpaio, this looks to be a step toward creating some kind of fascist police state, more focused on controlling a disgruntled population than on serving and protecting against crime. A big part of the problem is that the military has been massively involved in setting up and training police in Iraq and Afghanistan along this very model. Add to that the fact that many police officers in the US have military backgrounds, that a large percentage of veterans have PTSD issues, and that lax gun laws have greatly increased the risks of police work in the US. For more, equally ominous, see: Attorney General Jeff Sessions: Hurricane Harvey Is Proof We Need to Militarize Our Police Forces. Also consider another of Trump's favorite sheriffs: John Nichols: Scandal-Plagued Sheriff David Clarke Would Make a Bad Trump Administration Even Worse.

  • Mike Konczal: Well-off "helicopter" parents are super annoying, but they didn't create economic inequality: Reviews Richard Reeves' book Dream Hoarders, which charges the upper 20 percent ("the professional class") as the main beneficiaries and perpetrators of increasing inequality in America, especially for how their zealous parenting practices seek to hoard opportunity for their own children, rather than allowing meritocracy to rebalance itself. Most critics, including Konczal, would rather discuss inequality in terms of the top 1% (or even 0.1%), because that's where the changes have been most dramatic -- Konczal provides a chart of "share of GDP by income level, 1979 to 2014" showing no visible change from 79-94 percentile, slanting up to about a 35% rise at 98 and 90% at 99. Beyond demolishing Reeves' arguments, Konczal offers some practical proposals:

    Here are more practical ideas: We know how to start draining the rents from the upper middle class. An aggressive public option and governmental price-setting in health care would deflate medical sector rents. Free college would force private schools to compete on price rather than continue to feed off people's desperation to climb illusory status ladders. Deeper transparency in financial markets, more comprehensive prudential regulations, and enforcement of financial crimes would make it harder for financiers to profit off the systemic risk they create. Enforcing antitrust and public utility rules more aggressively would open up bottlenecks in economic activity. Higher progressive taxation reduces the incentives to rent seek in the first place. . . .

    If you want to go after the upper-middle-class's 401(k) deductions, you're going to have to strengthen Social Security. If you want to go after employer provided health care, it matters greatly whether or not there will be Medicare for All or a serious "public option" as an alternative. And if you want to go after college savings accounts, you need to have broadly accessible free public colleges.

  • Paul Krugman: Fascism, American Style: Fascism in each country has its own style: while Mussolini looked back to Rome, Hitler used two previous German Reichs, while Franco was fond of the Inquisition. America doesn't have anything quite like those, but Trump's slogan implies a similar mythic past. Still, what makes fascism a coherent political ideology isn't aesthetics. It starts by denouncing groups of people, and uses the hatred it generates as a springboard to power, moving on to use state violence to attack supposed enemies, while its elite cadres help themselves to the spoils. I haven't seen a lot of value in describing Trump as a fascist, mostly because I still see more mainstream Republican conservatives as more dangerous, but no doubt that he colors himself fascist, even when he doesn't have the more expert Steve Bannon to touch up the details. One thing that helps Trump out is that conservatives have already done much of the intellectual work in creating a view of a fallen past greatness Trump can promise to restore: think of Scalia's "originalism," the distorted Founding Father images invoked by the Tea Party, and most effectively how the cult of the "lost cause" was used to reestablish white supremacy (although most Americans have grown weary of making a fetish out of slavery). Krugman doesn't work this out. What pushed him into using the F-word was Trump's Arpaio pardon:

    Let's call things by their proper names here. Arpaio is, of course, a white supremacist. But he's more than that. There's a word for political regimes that round up members of minority groups and send them to concentration camps, while rejecting the rule of law: What Arpaio brought to Maricopa, and what the president of the United States has just endorsed, was fascism, American style.

    Trump's motives are easy to understand. For one thing, Arpaio, with his racism and authoritarianism, really is his kind of guy. For another, the pardon is a signal to those who might be tempted to make deals with the special investigator as the Russia probe closes in on the White House: Don't worry, I'll protect you.

    Finally, standing up for white people who keep brown people down pleases Trump's base, whom he's going to need more than ever as the scandals creep closer and the big policy wins he promised keep not happening.

    I haven't been reading Krugman's columns lately, nor his blog (which he seemed to be abandoning as his attention span moved to Twitter), but here are some recent columns:

    • Trump and Pruitt, Making America Polluted Again (Aug. 25).

    • What Will Trump Do to American Workers?

    • Trump Makes Caligula Look Pretty Good (Aug. 18).

    • Who Ate Republicans' Brains? (July 31):

      The Republican health care debacle was the culmination of a process of intellectual and moral deterioration that began four decades ago, at the very dawn of modern movement conservatism -- that is, during the very era anti-Trump conservatives now point to as the golden age of conservative thought.

      A key moment came in the 1970s, when Irving Kristol, the godfather of neoconservatism, embraced supply-side economics -- the claim, refuted by all available evidence and experience, that tax cuts pay for themselves by boosting economic growth. Writing years later, he actually boasted about valuing political expediency over intellectual integrity: "I was not certain of its economic merits but quickly saw its political possibilities." In another essay, he cheerfully conceded to having had a "cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit," because it was all about creating a Republican majority -- so "political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government."

      The problem is that once you accept the principle that it's O.K. to lie if it helps you win elections, it gets ever harder to limit the extent of the lying -- or even to remember what it's like to seek the truth.

    • The Sanctimony and Sin of G.O.P. 'Moderates' (July 27).

    Meanwhile, Krugman's blog has a useful post on Monopoly Rents and Corporate Taxation (Wonkish); also How Bad Will It Be If We Hit the Debt Ceiling?, and the post-Bannon Whither Trumpism?:

    So if Bannon is out, what's left? It's just reverse Robin Hood with extra racism.

    On real policy, in other words, Trump is now bankrupt.

    But he does have the racism thing. And my prediction is that with Bannon and economic nationalism gone, he will eventually double down on that part even more. If anything, Trumpism is going to get even uglier, and Trump even less presidential (if such a thing is possible) now that he has fewer people pushing for trade wars.

  • Jim Lyons: The Rush to Develop Oil and Gas We Don't Need: The Trump administration is going apeshit in its eagerness to do favors for the oil and gas industry, even at a time when oversupply undercuts prices and companies are loathe to develop the properties they already have. Also see: Alison Rose Levy: Who's Behind Fossil Fuel Extraction? It's Not Just Republicans.

  • Danielle Ofri: 'No Apparent Distress' Tackles the Distress of the Sick, Poor and Uninsured: Book review of Rachel Pearson: No Apparent Distress: A Doctor's Coming-of-Age on the Front Lines of American Medicine, about what happens to people who can't get (mostly because they can't afford) decent health insurance:

    This is the blossoming truth of No Apparent Distress -- that a segment of American society has been casually cast aside, left to scavenge on the meager scraps of volunteer health services, and failing that, left to die. Such abdication is no mere oversight, as Pearson outlines. The president of U.T.M.B. later publicly stated that care for those without means was no longer part of the school's "core mission." The same can be said for much of the United States.

    Pearson describes a homeless man whom the students diagnosed with throat cancer. (Texas chose not to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act so is now home to 25 percent of the adult Americans who fall into the coverage gap between private insurance and Medicaid.) It took eight cruel months until a hospital accepted the patient into its indigent program for treatment. To satisfy a requirement that the man live nearby, a relative was found who bought him a tiny trailer home. Just after the first scans were done, though, the hospital got wind of the trailer. This "asset" disqualified him as indigent and he was promptly kicked out of the program. The cancer was never removed or treated.

  • Matthew Rozsa: Missouri Republican: People who vandalize Confederate statues should be lynched: Well, that's certainly in the spirit of the people who put them up. I normally don't bother with stupid-things-stupid-people-say articles, otherwise I'd wind up linking to things like This pastor thinks that Houston deserved Hurricane Harvey because of its "pro-homosexual mayor".

  • Gershon Shafir: Why has the Occupation lasted this long? A slice from the author's new book: A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine, and the World's Most Intractable Conflict. Mostly stuff you should know by now, but it's worth recalling that settlements in the Occupied Territories were driven from two distinct movements, each operating from their own peculiar logic. The first was the LSM (Labor Settler Movement), driven by habit from the earliest days of Zionism but couched in terms of defense and security, and implemented by a state and military controlled by Labor until 1977. The other was led by Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful), a messianic cult led by Rabbi Kook, which was adopted by the Revisionist camp after Likud (Menachem Begin) came to power in 1977. The following quote sums up this change nicely, underscoring that the latter settler movement always intended to dominate the Palestinians, even though that formula precluded any possible peace. One should also note that because Labor was genetically disposed toward settlement, Labor politicians have never been able to check the expansion of the settlements, even if they realized how much they were an obstacle to peace and ultimately to the defense of Israel.

    In short, to gain national legitimation, Gush Emunim made the great legacy of colonization its own even as it reinterpreted it through a religious lens. After a conversation with Gush Emunim representatives in July 1974, Shimon Peres concluded: "We are living in two separate countries. You live in a country that needs to be settled, while I live in a country that needs to be defended." Porat rejected the assertion that the role of Zionism was to constitute a safe haven for Jews so they could hold their own in the world. Gush Emunim viewed Zionism differently, as "the process of redemption in its concrete sense -- the redemption of the people, and the redemption of the land -- and in its divine sense -- the redemption of the godhead, the redemption of the world." Just how far Gush Emunim had distanced itself from the idea of maintaining a "military frontier" may be seen from its rejection not only of the principle of security but also of the goal of peace. "A secular peace," said another founder of Gush Emunim, "is not our goal." Its starting point with regard to peace was religious and messianic, so it saw peace as attainable only in the end of days.

    Third, Gush Emunim colonization rejected demographic criteria for choosing the location of Jewish colonies. The odd "N"-shaped pattern of colonization during the Yishuv -- running from Upper Galilee down to the Bet Shean Valley and then diagonally across the Jezreel Valley (Marj Ibn-Amer) up to Haifa and Nahariya, and down again to Gedera -- followed the layout of the valleys and coastal areas, less secure during Ottoman times and consequently less densely inhabited by Palestinians. Gush Emunim colonization, in contrast, was aimed at the mountainous regions where the vast majority of Palestinians resided (see map 2). As Gush Emunim saw it, Jewish settlements up to the 1948 War had spread out over the "wrong" part of the Palestine, the coastal region that in antiquity was inhabited not by the Jews but by the Philistines. Gush Emunim wanted not only to correct this pattern and restore history by moving Jews into the lands they had held in biblical times but to join the ancient homeland to Israel within the Green Line. In the process, Gush Emunim tossed overboard the LSM's goal of creating an ethnically homogeneous colony. It advocated pushing settlement into the locations of ancient Jewish towns and villages that had a dense Palestinian population in order to undermine the possibility of territorial partition. It also raised the Israeli-Palestinian conflict's stakes by leaving little contiguous territory for a potential Palestinian state, increasing friction, and producing higher levels of violence in which the settlers themselves played the role of both vigilantes and soldiers drafted into regional military units that protected their settlements.

    In case you've wondered about Jared Kushner's "peace mission" to Israel-Palestine, note that he's actually showed up for work, then refused to do any. Richard Silverstein explains: Trump Trashes Two-States . . . and 30 Years of U.S. Policy on Israel-Palestine. By giving up on the "two state solution" Trump and Kushner are admitting they're not even going to go through the motions of pretending that they have any interest or intent on resolving the conflict peacefully. Maybe they imagine that Abbas will eventually surrender to an Israeli diktat, but I doubt the Israeli leadership can even come up with one. As we've seen from fifty years now, they'd much prefer the status quo -- and that's not about to change as long as the US continues to provide them unquestioning support and cover:

    It's vitally important to understand the broader implications: there will be no advances in the peace process as long as Trump is president. We knew this implicitly. But now we see it plain as day. . . .

    I hate to repeat myself, as I've written something like this before: we are in for a wicked few years of chaos and violence given this policy vacuüm caused by Trump's absconding from a meaningful role. A people with no hope has nothing to lose. If you think you've seen violence, it can and will get worse. And in ways we can't now foresee.

    Even Peter Beinart, who first noticed the import of the quotation in the Post article, calls the Trump position "absurd." The only thing I could add is to call it criminally absurd. That is because of this atrocious policy position tens of thousands are likely to die. Among them will be scores, if not hundreds of Israelis (this last statement is meant for the hasbarafia who will likely cheer this development in the comment threads).

    I'll add that the world -- and I don't just mean the "Arab world" or "Muslim world," although there's that too -- already sees the US as culpable for Israel's repression, cruelty, and violence, and the more evidence the world sees, the more resentment will build up. At the same time Trump is more directly engaged in murderous wars against ISIS and other Islamist groups from Afghanistan through Syria to Libya and Somalia, while US proxies are committing mass murder in Yemen -- and Trump has largely ceded direction of those wars to narrow-minded generals. Moreover, Trump is closely aligned to Islamophobes in the US and Europe, who would like nothing better than to impose their injustice and bigotry in the harshest terms possible.

  • Eileen Sullivan/Mark Landler: Trump Says US Is Paying 'Extortion Money' to North Korea: Nobody knows what he's talking about, possibly because they were more terrified by his next line: "Talking is not the answer!" Over recent months I've taken some solace when I've taken the "nothing is off the table" cliché as meaning that talks are still possible, but Trump seems determined to exclude the only thing that might actually work, even though he really doesn't have any other option. As for "extortion," from the start of his campaign he's been clear that other countries should be paying the US more -- including South Korea and Japan, whose "defense" has the US has long subsidized.

  • Kenneth P Vogel: Google Critic Ousted From Think Tank Funded by Tech Giant: Decades ago the right-wing laid the foundations of their power by funding so-called think tanks to give their agenda a bit of intellectual spit and polish. In the 1990s, liberals realized they needed to play that game too, founding a number of groups, including the "non-partisan" New America Foundation in 1999. Google's Eric Schmidt is chairman of a board which includes finance capitalists, some fairly well-known middle-of-the-road authors (James Fallows, Atul Gawande, Zachary Karabell, Daniel Yergin, Fareed Zakaria) and some token conservatives (David Brooks, Walter Russell Mead, Reihan Salam), with liberal hawk Anne-Marie Slaughter president. [By the way, Rosa Brooks is a fellow there. One of her articles cited there, published back in October, is: The Importance of Working in the Trump Administration.] The fired researcher is Barry C. Lynn, director of their Open Markets project, author of two important books: End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation (2005) and Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction. As his New America bio notes:

    Lynn's writings on the political and economic effects of the extreme consolidation of power in the United States have influenced the thinking of policymakers and antitrust professionals on both sides of the Atlantic.

    Google was recently found guilty of violating EU antitrust law and fined 2.42 billion Euros ($2.7 billion) for rigging its search results in favor of its advertisers -- offhand, that sounds more like racketeering than antitrust, but it's their de facto search engine monopoly that makes such a racket possible. Lynn's statement on this appeared in a New America press release:

    The Open Markets Team congratulates European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager and the European competition authority for this important decision. Google's market power is one of the most critical challenges for competition policymakers in the world today. By requiring that Google give equal treatment to rival services instead of privileging its own, Vestager is protecting the free flow of information and commerce upon which all democracies depend. We call upon U.S. enforcers, including the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice, and states attorneys general, to build upon this important precedent, both in respect to Google and to other dominant platform monopolists including Amazon. U.S. enforcers should apply the traditional American approach to network monopoly, which is to cleanly separate ownership of the network from ownership of the products and services sold on that network, as they did in the original Microsoft case of the late 1990s.

    Some more pieces on Google, New America, and Lynn's firing:

    Evidently Open Markets will be spun off as an independent outfit, Citizens Against Monopoly, so at least this gives them some much needed publicity. For more on Google, see Jonathan Taplin: Why is Google spending record sums on lobbying Washington?:

    Given the increased antitrust scrutiny that is coming from the Democrats' new "Better Deal" policy platform, Donald Trump's random tweets attacking Google's fellow tech giant Amazon for its connection to the Washington Post, and his adviser Steve Bannon's recent comments that Google and Facebook should be regulated as utilities, it is likely Google will only increase its lobbying expenditure in the next few months.

    The largest monopoly in America, Google controls five of the top six billion-user, universal web platforms -- search, video, mobile, maps and browser -- and leads in 13 of the top 14 commercial web functions, according to Scott Cleland at Precursor Consulting. . . .

    It is important to understand that Google is not politically neutral. Though its executives may signal liberal stances on gay rights and immigration, it is at heart a libertarian firm which believes above all that corporations should not be regulated by the government. Just as extreme lobbying by the bank industry led to a loosening of regulations, which then resulted in the great mortgage scam of 2008, Google's efforts to keep the government out of its business may have deep implications for the next 10 years. . . .

    But now, for the first time in their histories, the possibility of regulation may be on the horizon. Google's response will be to spend more of its $90bn in cash on politicians. K Street is lining up to help.

    It's probably dated by now, but the first taste that I got that Google was potentially dangerous came from Siva Vaidhyanathan's 2011 book, The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry). I'm still less bothered by Google than I was by Microsoft when I followed the antitrust case closely circa 1999, but their profits, power, and potential for abuse are comparable. Moreover, Schmidt's chuminess with Obama and the Clintons doesn't make any of them better public servants. Also, one of the most sobering facts I've run across lately is how Trump's massive buy of last-minute YouTube advertising probably tipped the election -- that's one of Google's platforms, an effective monopoly that he had no problem selling to the highest (or in many ways, the lowest) bidder. Real competition would save us from that kind of power.

  • Odd Arne Westad: The Cold War and America's Delusion of Victory: Excerpt from the author's book, The Cold War: A World History. a broad picture with many things I'd quibble with (e.g., he says "Stalin's policies" made conflict with the US inevitable, and he dismisses Mao's entire rule as "out of tune with its needs").

    America's post-Cold War triumphalism came in two versions. First was the Clinton version, which promoted a prosperity agenda of market values on a global scale. Its lack of purpose in international affairs was striking, but its domestic political instincts were probably right: Americans were tired of foreign entanglements and wanted to enjoy "the peace dividend."

    As a result, the 1990s was a lost opportunity for international cooperation, particularly to combat disease, poverty and inequality. The most glaring examples of these omissions were former Cold War battlefields like Afghanistan, Congo and Nicaragua, where the United States could not have cared less about what happened -- once the Cold War was over.

    The second was the Bush version. Where President Bill Clinton emphasized prosperity, President George W. Bush emphasized predominance. In between, of course, stood Sept. 11. . . .

    As America entered a new century, its main aim should have been to bring other nations into the fold of international norms and the rule of law, especially as its own power diminishes. Instead, the United States did what declining superpowers often do: engage in futile, needless wars far from its borders, in which short-term security is mistaken for long-term strategic goals. The consequence is an America less prepared than it could have been to deal with the big challenges of the future: the rise of China and India, the transfer of economic power from West to East, and systemic challenges like climate change and disease epidemics.

    Gradually between the founding of the UN in 1945 and the mid-1990s American politicians lost all faith in international institutions and law, and that's ultimately a big story. The first stage was when the US started creating captive alliances to exclude the Soviet Union and launch the Cold War (Marshall Plan, NATO, etc.). The second was when the US formed alliances with imperial powers (like France in Vietnam) and local despots (like Iran's Shah and Indonesia's Suharto) against popular movements, democracy, and human rights. Along the way the US developed an instrumental view of the UN, trying to use it to advance exclusive interests and eventually finding it to be more of an obstacle than a subordinate. In this regard, Israel has been pivotal: the more Israel become ostracized in the UN, the more the US seeks to obstruct and marginalize the UN. By the 1990s, liberal hawks came to prefer US unilateral military action to international stalemate. The neocons brought all of these tendencies together, insisting that world order be dictated by the US as the "sole superpower." Early on US foreign policy was captured by globalized corporations and arms merchants, and while they didn't necessarily see eye-to-eye, their compromises turned the US into the dangerously conceited rogue state we see today. It's easy enough to see that anti-communism was at the root of all this, and that the contempt it held for workers has not only turned the US imperious abroad, it has flooded back into domestic politics, its promotion of inequality rendering government, business, and society ever more careless and cruel.

  • Matthew Yglesias: Four Stories That Actually Mattered This Week: Devastating floods hit Texas and Louisiana; Congress is facing a busy September; Trump is cutting Obamacare marketing to the bone; DACA is hanging in the balance. Other Yglesias posts: Mick Mulvaney brags that he tricked Trump into proposing Social Security cuts; Trump is looking to revive a discredited Bush-era tax gimmick; Paul Ryan's postcard tax return is really dumb; It's time for Democrats' wonk class to write some single-payer plans.

    The "postcard tax return" piece has some interesting points -- some gleaned from T.R. Reid's book A Fine Mess, a survey of how other nations run their tax collection systems. He points out that in Japan, for example, the government collects tax input information continuously and automatically adjusts withholding so that most people wind up paying exactly the right amount each year. At year end, the government sends out a notice of what it did, which taxpayers can amend, but otherwise they needn't file returns. Such a system is pretty easy for most wage earners, even with interest and other currently tracked earnings. I can imagine it being developed further to handle more complex cases, like small businesses. Yglesias points out that things like tax brackets have no real effect on form complexity. Virtually all of the complication in the income tax system comes from income determination, mostly deciding what expenses to allow in offsetting gross receipts. (Itemized deductions to personal income have largely been phased out in favor of a relatively generous "standard deduction," although it wouldn't be too hard to track them in real time either.) Moreover, the government could start an open source software project to implement all of this, adding accounting and personal finance features that would reduce the cost for businesses while collecting all the necessary inputs. Of course, politicians like Ryan don't want to do any of this: they want to keep taxation painful so it will be easy to rile people up against the tax system. And, of course, making sure the government doesn't do useful or helpful things for most people makes taxes look like expenses instead of investments.

The big breaking story as I was writing all of this is that North Korea has tested some sort of hydrogen-booster nuclear warhead, one reportedly small enough that it can be delivered by one of their recently tested ICBMs. This has resulted in a lot of typically unguarded and occasionally insane threats from Trump and company: e.g., Trump: North Korea Is a 'Rogue Nation' for Conducting a 'Major Nuclear Test'; After Reported H-Bomb Test, Trump Mulls Attacking North Korea; Trump: Maybe we'll end all trade with countries that trade with North Korea; Mnuchin Says He Will 'Draft a Sanctions Package' Against North Korea; Mattis: US Will Meet 'Any Threat' With 'Massive Military Response'; Trump Says He'll Meet With 'Military Leaders' to Discuss North Korea. Also note that Trump has lately become increasingly hostile to China and Russia, the most obvious diplomatic channels to Pyongyang -- e.g., US Plans More South China Sea Patrols to 'Challenge China'; Jim Mattis, in Ukraine, Says U.S. Is Thinking of Sending Weapons; US Seizes Russian Diplomatic Posts in San Francisco, Washington, New York; Russia to 'Respond Harshly' to Latest US Measures; Putin Warns US-North Korea Standoff Risks Starting Large-Scale Conflict. When asked whether he intends to attack North Korea, Trump's response was "we'll see." I've written enough about this I shouldn't have to rehash the risks and follies of US policy. Indeed, most knowledgeable people in Washington -- a group that excludes the president -- seem to grasp the basic issues, but their minds are stuck in the rut that sees the military as the only answer to every problem. So, I guess, we'll see.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, August 27, 2017

Weekend Roundup

The big story, one I have nothing on below, is probably what Hurricane Harvey is doing to Texas as I write -- and as I look at the forecast map, will keep doing through Wednesday. I watched one woman on Fox News going on about how this disaster will finally give Trump the chance to appear presidential and gain back some of his lost support. I noted how the governor of Texas was thanking the federal government for their support. Evidently this won't be the week when Republicans go around quoting Ronald Reagan on how the scariest words in the English language are "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." In point of fact, the party that wants to reduce government so small it can be drowned in a bathtub doesn't have a very good record in responding to natural disasters (or, really, any kind of disaster -- cf. 9/11 as well as Katrina).

This week's scattered links:

  • Zeeshan Aleem: Nikki Haley's path to the presidency runs right past Trump: Notes that "The UN ambassador's profile is rising as she runs her own show," and quotes Sen. Lindsey Graham as saying, "She sounds more like me than Trump." I wonder if Haley didn't get the idea that UN Ambassador would be a plum presidential stepping stone from House of Cards. It certainly gives her opportunities to poise bellicose for the press. Of course, if people start talking her up, Trump might get jealous and sack her. On the other hand, that's probably in her plan as the next step.

  • Randall Balmer: Under Trump, evangelicals show their true racist colors.

  • Zack Beauchamp: Sebastian Gorka, Trump's most controversial national security aide, is out: Obviously the next to go after Bannon got sacked, at least he took the time to write a blustery resignation letter, vowing to fight on against the administration's "globalists" in Trump's name -- as the old joke goes, now he'll be outside the tent pissing in.

  • Alvin Chang: We analyzed 17 months of Fox & Friends transcripts. It's far weirder than state-run media.

    Since Trump was elected, Fox & Friends has taken a special place in the media landscape. It's clear that the program is in something of a feedback loop with the president. But contrary to what CNN president Jeff Zucker says, this isn't state-run television "extolling the line out of the White House." Scholars tend to say state-run media usually aims to keep the rank and file in line, while demobilizing the populace and deflating political opposition. Most of it is very boring. Watch some live Chinese state-run media and you'll immediately understand. . . .

    What we found is that Fox & Friends has a symbiotic relationship with Trump that is far weirder and more interesting than state media. Instead of talking for Trump, they are talking to him.

    The regular hosts -- Steve Doocy, Brian Kilmeade, and Ainsley Earhardt -- and their rotating cast of guests increasingly view their role as giving advice to the president. They prognosticate on what the president, his staff, or his party should do. And it's all couched in language that makes it seem they are on his side -- that the damning news reports from mainstream media were unfair obstacles to his presidency.

    That is in contrast to what Fox & Friends was before Trump. In 2013, media scholar Jeffrey P. Jones argued that Fox & Friends creates an ideologically homogeneous community and reinforces it by creating a high school-like atmosphere. "The show is designed to thrust the viewer into a common-sense groupthink, complete with all the rumours, smears, innuendo, fear-mongering, thinly veiled ad hominem attacks, and lack of rational discourse they can muster -- you know, just like high school," he writes.

    But in the 2016 election, the man who loves their show and listens to their political and cultural ruminations became the leader of the free world.

    Fox & Friends went from being the bully on the periphery to the prom king's posse.

  • Esme Cribb: Trump's Afghan Strategy: 'Killing Terrorists,' Not Nation Building: Quick summary of Trump's Monday night "Afghanistan Strategy" speech. Despite all the "pillars" and "multi-pronged strategy," what this sounds like is that he's shelving the COIN theory -- all that stuff about protecting Afghan communities and helping them develop -- and returning to the core competency of the US military, which is wholesale slaughter of anyone who gets in our way (aka, "killing terrorists"; who are these "terrorists"? well, the people we kill). To accomplish this he'll allow the generals to requisition whatever forces they want, with no review from the White House let alone Congress. And he's set the standard for ending the war so high that it's become a moot point. In effect, he's put the war on autopilot, where the only real goal is to punish the Afghan people for America's failure to secure any form of stability. This approach is not unprecedented in American history: Nixon did the same thing in Vietnam when he reduced US troop levels while winding up with a murderous rampage, hoping to impress on the world that while a people may defy the United States, they will suffer mightily for the affront. The only word that described this is sadism: having failed to impose American will, the only way Trump can recover his sense of power is by inflicting suffering on others. Trump's concept of "America First" doesn't seem to extend much beyond "fuck everyone else" (nor does his concept of America extend to many people living here).

    Some more links on Trump and Afghanistan:

  • John Feffer: Avoiding War With Pyongyang: alternate title, "Trump and the Geopolitics of Crazy." Good in-depth article, which points out that the US (Jimmy Carter, at least) has successfully negotiated with the DPRK before, that in terms of crazy vs. crazy Trump and Kim Jong-un have little if anything on Nixon and Mao in 1970, and that despite all those sanctions North Korea has been cautiously changing toward the sort of market economy corporations love doing business with in China. Now, if only someone in Washington was listening. Another report suggesting that Kim Jong-un might not be the crazier of the adversaries is: Jon Schwarz: North Korea Keeps Saying It Might Give Up Its Nuclear Weapons -- but Most News Outlets Won't Tell You That.

  • Rebecca Gordon: Is Anything the Moral Equivalent of War? Reading the title, I recognized the phrase but couldn't place it, perhaps because it never made sense to me: at least from the early Americanization of the Vietnam War I never saw anything moral in war, so couldn't imagine any virtuous activity as being its "moral equivalent." The phrase turns out to have been coined by William James in 1906 attempting to find an alternative activity to the "martial spirit" that warmongers like Theodore Roosevelt were so keen on promoting. The phrase was then popularized in a 1977 speech by President Jimmy Carter where he tried to marshall America's militarist spirits to tackle the "energy crisis." As you no doubt recall, the American people responded by voting Carter out of office, choosing instead to bury their heads in Reagan's "morning in America" fantasy. Probably didn't help that the acronym militarists gave the speech was MEOW, but the fact is that by 1977 even real war didn't satisfy James' MEOW demands. A couple years earlier the Army had given up on the draft because way too many of those impressed into service couldn't be trusted to carry out orders -- the obvious advantage of the no-draft army is that volunteers were much less likely to "frag" their officers. On the other hand, even "professional" soldiers are likely to have joined for purely economic reasons, which only made sense if their risk was minimal. Gordon plays a bit with MEOW theory, noting that war "requires from whole populations a special kind of heroic focus, a willingness to mobilize and sacrifice, a commitment to community or country . . . it also requires people to relinquish their own petty interests in the service of a greater whole." That, at least, is the idea behind America's many metaphorical wars -- on crime, poverty, drugs, cancer -- none of which have been particularly successful, possibly because Americans no longer seek MEOWs -- or, in most cases, let real shooting wars impose much on their everyday lives. But it's also because our conventional thinking about war corrupts and perverts these metaphorical wars, which is something Gordon does go into at more depth. She also suggests that the War on Terror is itself yet another metaphorical war, even though this one is fought with bombs and bullets.

  • Josh Marshall: Thoughts on Trump's Speech: On Tuesday's rally in Phoenix:

    Aside from the rambling weirdness, the big things are these. President Trump spent something like forty-five minutes in a wide-ranging primal scream about Charlottesville, ranting at the press, giving what might generously be called a deeply misleading and dishonest summary of what he actually said. It all amounted to one big attack on the press for supposedly lying about him.

    There were some other points that were momentary and perhaps easy to miss but quite important.

    1. Trump essentially promised he would pardon Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a major sop to the anti-immigrant, white nationalist base.
    2. Trump suggested he would probably end up withdrawing from NAFTA because negotiations will fail. That statement will have major repercussions.
    3. Trump threatened to shut down the government to force Congress's hand on getting his border wall.
    4. While grandiosely not mentioning the names of Jeff Flake or John McCain, he nonetheless went after them and made his opposition to both quite clear. Presidents don't generally attack members of their own party going into a midterm elections.

    More links related to Trump's speech in Arizona:

    • Jenna Johnson: As Trump ranted and rambled in Phoenix, his crowd slowly thinned:

      Just before President Trump strolled onto the rally stage on Tuesday evening, four speakers took turns carefully denouncing hate, calling for unity and ever so subtly assuring the audience that the president is not racist. . . . Meanwhile, a supporter seated directly behind stage even wore a T-shirt that stated: "Trump & Republicans are not racist."

      Then Trump took the stage.

      He didn't attempt to continue the carefully choreographed messaging of the night or to narrow the ever-deepening divide between the thousands of supporters gathered in the convention center hall before him and the thousands of protesters waiting outside.

      Instead, Trump spent the first three minutes of his speech -- which would drag on for 75 minutes -- marveling at his crowd size, claiming that "there aren't too many people outside protesting," predicting that the media would not broadcast shots of his "rather incredible" crowd and reminiscing about how he was "center stage, almost from day one, in the debates."

    • Dara Lind: Joe Arpaio, the anti-immigrant sheriff That Trump wants to save from prison, explained. Also on Arpaio, see: Noah Feldman: Arpaio Pardon Would Show Contempt for Constitution.

    • Heather Digby Parton: Trump in Arizona: Threats, paranoia and a dark lesson in white history.

    • Charles P Pierce: I Have No More Patience for Trump Supporters:

      Before we get to the other stuff, and there was lots of other stuff, I'd like to address myself to those people represented by the parenthetical notation (Applause) in the above transcript, those people who waited for hours in 105-degree heat so that they could have the G-spot of their irrationality properly stroked for them. You're all suckers. You're dim and you're ignorant and you can't even feel yourself sliding toward something that will surprise even you with its fundamental ugliness, . . .

      A guy basically went mad, right there on the stage in front of you, and you cheered and booed right on cue because you're sheep and because he directed his insanity at all the scapegoats that your favorite radio and TV personalities have been creating for you over the past three decades.

    On Friday, Joe Arpaio became the first person Trump issued a presidential pardon for. See: Dara Lind: The real reason Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio:

    [Arpaio's contempt of court conviction ] was a predictable consequence of the way he'd run his department -- guided by a philosophy that as long as law-enforcement officials were grabbing headlines by going after undesirable people, the public wouldn't care so much about how it was done.

    The Trump administration has turned that philosophy into a matter of federal rhetoric (such as Trump's "joke" urging officers to be rough with suspects when shoving them into the backs of police cars) and policy (in walking back court-enforced federal oversight of police departments). President Trump himself is liable to tweet angrily about "so-called" judges when he doesn't get his way.

    Joe Arpaio is lucky that he was convicted under a president who cares more about the order Arpaio professed to maintain than the laws to which he was supposed to adhere. But Donald Trump is far luckier that he had, in Arpaio, a model for how such a politician could operate.

    Lind also wrote: Trump's Arpaio pardon sends a message to sheriffs: I'm your get-out-of-jail-free card; also see: Lawrence Douglas: Why Donald Trump pardoned the unpardonable Joe Arpaio; Andrew Rudalevige: Why Trump's pardon of Joe Arpaio isn't like most presidential pardons; Conor Friedersdorf: The Arpaio Pardon Is a Flagrant Assault on Civil Rights; Scott Lemieux: The disturbing lessons of Trump's shameful Arpaio pardon. Douglas may have the best quote:

    What unites these acts of teardown are their cheapness, cynicism and recklessness. They are cheap: requiring nothing in the way of the hard work of shaping and negotiating policy. This is a politics of fatigue, indolence elevated to administrative practice. They are cynical: the performance of a president-cum-snake-oil-salesman, working to dupe his credulous audience that his bogus recipes constitute the promised potent tonic. And they are reckless, profoundly reckless, as they represent a contempt for the rule of law and for the norms of constitutional democracy.

    In pardoning Arpaio, our unpresident has undone the principle that informs the practice of pardon; he has sided with the lawless renegade against our federal judiciary and the constitution itself.

    Also on Arpaio, here's a link to a 2008 story, about how taxpayers had to pay $1.1 million "to settle another of Sheriff Joe Arpaio's lawsuits," also "on top of the more than $43 million the county has paid for the jail lawsuits": Matt Shuham: 'Arizona Republic' Slams Arpaio Pardon: Trump Made It Clear Racism 'Is a Goal'; A Phony Murder Plot Against Joe Arpaio Winds Up Costing Taxpayers $1.1 Million.

    By the way, there is a case for presidential pardons. Here's a story where the power was used constructively: Ted Gioia: The Jazz Pianist That John F. Kennedy Saved.

  • Josh Marshall: Trump Is Killing McConnell in Kentucky: Latest PPP poll gives McConnell an 18% approval rating vs. 74% disapproval -- a drop which necessarily includes a lot of Republicans who have followed Trump's lead in blaming McConnell for Senate inaction on Trump agenda items. Also note that Trump's approval rating in Kentucky is still up at 60%, so he has way more sway there than nationwide. Still unlikely, I think, that Trump can convert such dissatisfaction into a viable primary challenge, but these numbers don't prove that he can't.

  • Corey Robin: Will Steve Bannon's war tear apart the Republican party?

    The right-wing racial populism that once served the conservative cause so well is now, as even the most conservative Republicans are acknowledging, getting in its way. Whatever the outcome of the civil war Bannon intends to fight, it'll be waged against the backdrop of a declining rather than an ascendant movement, with the tools of yesterday rather than tomorrow.

    That is why, having had seven months in the White House to prosecute his populist war on the Republican establishment -- something Buckley and his minions could only dream of in 1955 -- Bannon now finds himself staring into the abyss of a website, hoping to find there a power he couldn't find in the most powerful office of the world.

    Robin also wrote When Political Scientists Legitimate Torturers, about John Yoo's featured role in next week's American Political Science Association get together. Yoo was one of lawyers who rationalized the Bush-Cheney craving for torture, in a series of legal briefs that were pretty sadly tortured themselves. Robin cites Victor Klemperer arguing that the intellectuals who celebrated the Third Reich should be held as more guilty than the henchmen who merely carried out the crimes. Indeed, as I recall, there was a special session of the Nuremberg trials that focused on lawyers and judges. Lawyers like Yoo were in a position to prevent crimes from happening, and their failure to do so -- indeed, their active efforts as enablers -- should never be forgotten.

  • Dylan Scott: Why Obamacare didn't implode: Specifically, why every county in the country has at least one insurance company offering private coverage under ACA, contrary to recently raised alarms. Still lots of money to be made out there, at least as long as the federal government keeps paying subsidies. And while counties with no coverage are simply wasted, being the only insurer in a county is especially profitable.

  • Matt Taibbi: The Media Is the Villain -- for Creating a World Dumb Enough for Trump: More on how constant chaos and disaster has been good for business. The more general charge -- that the media have created the very conditions in which someone like Trump could become president -- could use a little more sharpening, but he does get this far:

    We learned long ago in this business that dumber and more alarmist always beats complex and nuanced. Big headlines, cartoonish morality, scary criminals at home and foreign menaces abroad, they all sell. We decimated attention spans, rewarded hot-takers over thinkers, and created in audiences powerful addictions to conflict, vitriol, fear, self-righteousness, and race and gender resentment.

    There isn't a news executive alive low enough to deny that we use xenophobia and racism to sell ads. Black people on TV for decades were almost always shirtless and chased by cops, and the "rock-throwing Arab" photo was a staple of international news sections even before 9/11. And when all else fails in the media world, just show more cleavage somewhere, and ratings go up, every time.

    Donald Trump didn't just take advantage of these conditions. He was created in part by them. What's left of Trump's mind is like a parody of the average American media consumer: credulous, self-centered, manic, sex-obsessed, unfocused, and glued to stories that appeal to his sense of outrage and victimhood.

    We've created a generation of people like this: anger addicts who can't read past the first page of a book. This is why the howls of outrage from within the ranks of the news media about Trump's election ring a little bit false. What the hell did we expect would happen? Who did we think would rise to prominence in our rage-filled, hyper-stimulated media environment? Sensitive geniuses?

    We spent years selling the lowest common denominator. Now the lowest common denominator is president. How can it be anything but self-deception to pretend this is an innocent coincidence?

    Paul Woodward comments (How much responsibility does the media have for creating Trump?), but doesn't really get to the heart of the problem. I don't have time to start unpacking this here.

  • Jean M Twenge: Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? "More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they're on the brink of a mental-health crisis." I've long been impressed with arguments about how technological change shapes how we view the world -- most memorable was John Berger's "Moment of Cubism," which attributed the sudden emergence of abstract art to the extraordinary mechanization circa 1900. As a "baby boomer" (b. 1950), I noted that all generations had their gaps, but ours seemed to be exceptionally large, contrasting the despair of depression and war my parents came of age in to the relative prosperity and security of my youth -- and, of course, I noted the technological factors, especially television. Indeed, it's tempting to blame nearly everything bad that's happened since on television (and, I'd add, its advertising) -- although more recent social critics have moved on to blaming computers and the internet, which have become vastly more immersive with the advent of smart phones. On the other hand, I've learned to lean against most claims of generational change, recognizing that continuity has a powerful way of reasserting itself. For instance, when I read this:

    My friends and I plotted to get our driver's license as soon as we could, making DMV appointments for the day we turned 16 and using our newfound freedom to escape the confines of our suburban neighborhood. . . .

    But the allure of independence, so powerful to previous generations, holds less sway over today's teens, who are less likely to leave the house without their parents. The shift is stunning: 12th-graders in 2015 were going out less often than eighth-graders did as recently as 2009.

    I think the anomaly here was back in the 1950s/60s, when cars (and, belatedly, roads) seemed to open up vast new vistas to explore and to experience. Since then cars have become ordinary and so utilitarian, while their maintenance costs have become more onerous -- something to be put off as long as possible. Meanwhile, air travel has become the portal to new vistas. I suspect her data on dating can be given a similar explanation. Still, I was struck by this, partly because the statistics given seem to be so significant:

    Girls have also borne the brunt of the rise in depressive symptoms among today's teens. Boys' depressive symptoms increased by 21 percent from 2012 to 2015, while girls' increased by 50 percent -- more than twice as much. The rise in suicide, too, is more pronounced among girls. Although the rate increased for both sexes, three times as many 12-to-14-year-old girls killed themselves in 2015 as in 2007, compared with twice as many boys. The suicide rate is still higher for boys, in part because they use more-lethal methods, but girls are beginning to close the gap.

    If total numbers are very small such a sudden jump might not be significant, but I suspect it is. I'd be more inclined to look for causes in the politico-economic sphere: increasing inequality chokes off opportunity for most people, persistent war generates terror, and American stupidity on things like climate change is enough to bum out any sentient being, but those things will hit the young much longer and harder than I can relate to. I grew up in a time when it was easy to be optimistic, yet even then my teen years were the most depressing of my life. Smart phones obviously steal time away from other things teens used to do, but as someone who had no appreciable social life back then I'm tempted to think the change may be for the better. But like all change, the blessings are mixed, and it would be better if we understood and appreciated that.

  • Matthew Yglesias: 4 stories that actually mattered this week: Trump announced a "new" strategy for Afghanistan; Republicans were consumed with weird infighting; Obamacare's empty counties all got filled; Health care at a crossroads. Other Yglesias: Trump's big mistake on health care was not realizing Republicans were lying; Democrats' 2018 gerrymandering problem is really bad ("a leading forecast says they'll get 54% of the votes -- and only 47% of the seats"); Justin Trudeau, unlike Trump, is taking NAFTA renegotiation really seriously; After embracing orthodox Republicanism on all fronts, what's the point of Trump?; Steve Bannon's "economic nationalism" is total nonsense. The latter piece could, I think, be better argued, but it's not like Trump (or even Bannon) has given us anything very substantial to work with. About the only idea I've heard to advance this thing called "economic nationalism" was a big tax on selected imports -- what we used to call a tariff -- but that's been squelched by lobbyists for companies that import lots of stuff, like WalMart. More simplistically, no one doubts that globalization has both winners and losers, both inside America and outside. The problem is our political system caters to winners and deplores losers. Trump was able to get some votes in 2016 by appearing less part of that system, but he never offered anything concrete to help the victims of globalization, and the lobbyists and millionaires he stocked his administration with aren't going to come up with anything either.

    I also have problems with "Trump's big mistake," which tries to credit Trump with wanting something better, at least during the campaign:

    On the campaign trail, he outlined some humane and politically popular ideas about health care policy like that Medicaid shouldn't be cut and that the United States should have a system that covers everybody even if that means the government needs to pay for it. A responsible president would move beyond peevish anger at congressional Republicans for failing to help him fulfill that vision and start reaching out to people who can help him. McConnell and Ryan aren't going to get the job done, but Trump's failure to even try to work across party lines on health policy is staggering -- and his anger at Republican leaders only makes it more glaring.

    The plainly obvious fact is that Trump doesn't care what's in the Republican Congressional bills, nor did he care what positions he took during the campaign. Remember his victory celebration when the House passed the second iteration of Ryan's bill, tweaked to gain right-wing votes even though it was obvious then that the bill would have to be scrapped and retooled to have a prayer in the Senate? If Trump cared about his campaign promises, he would have worked to make the bill less (not more) malevolent, but he didn't. And quite plainly, the only complaint he has about McConnell is that his bill failed, making Trump and the Republicans look weak. This matters not just for his ego, but because the idea that he's some kind of juggernaut helps to keep his business allies in line.

For background on the Confederate monuments issue, Paul Woodward points us to a 2001 book review by James M McPherson: Southern Comfort, which makes it crystal clear that the Confederate states seceded to buttress and defend (and ultimately to promote) their system of race-based slavery. That's shown well in the quote Woodward plucked out. That much has been clear to me for a long time, but I was struck by the timeliness (or timelessness) of the following:

As Richards makes clear, Southern politicians did not use this national power to buttress states' rights; quite the contrary. In the 1830s Congress imposed a gag rule to stifle antislavery petitions from Northern states. The Post Office banned antislavery literature from the mail if it was sent to Southern states. In 1850 Southerners in Congress, plus a handful of Northern allies, enacted a Fugitive Slave Law that was the strongest manifestation of national power thus far in American history. In the name of protecting the rights of slave owners, it extended the long arm of federal law, enforced by marshals and the army, into Northern states to recover escaped slaves and return them to their owners.

Senator Jefferson Davis, who later insisted that the Confederacy fought for the principle of state sovereignty, voted with enthusiasm for the Fugitive Slave Law. When Northern state legislatures invoked states' rights and individual liberties against this federal law, the Supreme Court with its majority of Southern justices reaffirmed the supremacy of national law to protect slavery (Ableman v. Booth, 1859). Many observers in the 1850s would have predicted that if a rebellion in the name of states' rights were to occur, it would be the North that would rebel.

Of course, having grown up in the '50s and '60s when Senate filibusters were almost exclusively used to frustrate majority-supported civil rights bills, it's always been clear to me that "states rights" was never more than an opportunistic ruse. More recently, it's become clear that Republicans will exalt the use of any jurisdiction they happen to hold power over -- the most obvious example is how they have taken to using their state legislative powers to overturn city and county statutes they dislike (Missouri vs. St. Louis is a leading case-in-point). Most recently, we see Trump and Sessions attempting to impose broad federal powers on "sanctuary cities" -- ostensibly to force them to help enforce federal anti-immigration law, which come to think of it isn't far removed from the 1850s Fugitive Slave Law.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, August 20, 2017

Weekend Roundup

Tina Fey got flack for this skit on Thursday's Saturday Night Live news special, where she advised people to skip Nazi/White Supremacist counter-protests and express their frustration by eating cake instead. I followed her advice and made a pan of extra-rich brownies, but I had an occasion to honor: Frank Smith was passing through Kansas, returning home after an AFSCME conference in DC, where he also found time for a demonstration outside the White House. I fixed a little vegetarian (not vegan) dinner in his honor: a leek-goat cheese quiche, three Ottolenghi salads -- spinach with dates, onions, toasted pitas and almonds; roast eggplant with tahini sauce; sweet potatoes with maple syrup and pecans -- and the brownies. I was so exhausted afterwards I went to bed early and slept eleven hours. It wasn't so much the work as general world-weariness. I remember a sense of unease back in 2001 when a friend chirped "we survived one George Bush; we can survive another." Well, lots of folks didn't survive that second one, and hardly anyone came out better from the ordeal. And as you get older, you start to wonder whether you're ever going to see a better world. Still, cake tastes good. Brownies with 6 oz. premium unsweetened chocolate even better.

[PS: Also see Tom Carson: The Brilliance of Tina Fey's Cake Satire, Explained.]

Meanwhile, I offer these links and comments because I don't really feel up to working on anything more creative or constructive.

The usual scattered links:

  • Kurt Andersen: How America Lost Its Mind: I can't argue with the conclusion -- clearly, a huge swath of Americans have lost their minds -- but I'd offer a simpler explanation than the '60s and the internet. In fact, I'd argue that the '60s at least opened up a vein of critical thinking in stark contrast to the rampant hypocrisy of the 1950s. That led directly to the most important revolutions of the post-WWII era: civil rights and liberties, women's liberation, rejection of war, the movement for the environment, consumer and worker protections. Also, the internet help break out of the corporate media stranglehold that had consolidated in the 1980s. The problem was the 1980s, when a cabal of conservative businessfolk somehow convinced most people to ignore reality and pretend it's "morning in America again" -- a deception that has become increasingly unhinged as right-wing and/or neoliberal control has proved ever more dysfunctional. Indeed, it's gotten so bad that the naďveté (and relative egalitarianism) of the 1950s has started to look good again, not that anyone seriously wants to go back there. But there's more wrong now than just the notion that reality and truth are subject to political interpretation. It's that the political agenda of the upper crust demands deception, and they have the means to mass-propagate it. All we have to fight back is critical thinking and what's left of the decentralized internet.

  • David Dayen: More Trump Populism: DOJ Shuts Down an Operation That Was Successfully Combatting Consumer Fraud:

    The justice department plans to terminate Operation Choke Point, an Obama-era law enforcement crackdown on scam consumer transactions that conservatives characterized as an attack on gun sellers and legal businesses. It concludes one of the more brazen misinformation efforts in recent political history -- with misinformation triumphing. . . .

    Karl Frisch, executive director of Allied Progress, a consumer rights group, said in a statement: "Ending this program will make it easier for financial predators and other unscrupulous industries to get the resources they need to carry out their deceptive and frequently unlawful business practices."

  • Jason Ditz: Trump: Afghan War Decisions Made: Trump's promising a major speech revealing his Afghanistan strategy on Monday, following a round of meetings at Camp David mostly attended by hawks, including mercenary mogul Erik Prince, and excluding Steve ("skeptic of military escalation") Bannon. I could probably dig up some speculation on this, but we might as well wait for the ball to drop. Then on Tuesday Trump flies to Phoenix for his big rally there, a chance to meet up with his old pal Joe Arpaio and, one assumes, talk about The Wall.

  • Tara Golshan: Anti-racism protesters totally eclipsed Boston's right-wing Free Speech rally: I've seen reports of up to 40,000 anti-racism protesters.

  • Mehdi Hasan: Donald Trump Has Been a Racist All His Life -- and He Isn't Going to Change After Charlottesville:

    Consider the first time the president's name appeared on the front page of the New York Times, more than 40 years ago. "Major Landlord Accused of Antiblack Bias in City," read the headline of the A1 piece on Oct. 16, 1973, which pointed out how Richard Nixon's Department of Justice had sued the Trump family's real estate company in federal court over alleged violations of the Fair Housing Act. . . .

    Over the next four decades, Trump burnished his reputation as a bigot: he was accused of ordering "all the black [employees] off the floor" of his Atlantic City casinos during his visits; claimed "laziness is a trait in blacks" and "not anything they can control"; requested Jews "in yarmulkes" replace his black accountants; told Bryan Gumbel that "a well-educated black has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white in terms of the job market"; demanded the death penalty for a group of black and Latino teenagers accused of raping a jogger in Central Park (and, despite their later exoneration with the use of DNA evidence, has continued to insist they are guilty); suggested a Native American tribe "don't look like Indians to me"; mocked Chinese and Japanese trade negotiators by doing an impression of them in broken English; described undocumented Mexican immigrants as "rapists"; compared Syrian refugees to "snakes"; defended two supporters who assaulted a homeless Latino man as "very passionate" people "who love this country"; pledged to ban a quarter of humanity from entering the United States; proposed a database to track American Muslims that he himself refused to distinguish from the Nazi registration of German Jews; implied Jewish donors "want to control" politicians and are all sly negotiators; heaped praise on the "amazing reputation" of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has blamed America's problems on a "Jewish mafia"; referred to a black supporter at a campaign rally as "my African-American"; suggested the grieving Muslim mother of a slain U.S. army officer "maybe . . . wasn't allowed" to speak in public about her son; accused an American-born Hispanic judge of being "a Mexican"; retweeted anti-Semitic and anti-black memes, white supremacists, and even a quote from Benito Mussolini; kept a book of Hitler's collected speeches next to his bed; declined to condemn both David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan; and spent five years leading a "birther" movement that was bent on smearing and delegitimizing the first black president of the United States, who Trump also accused of being the founder of ISIS.

    For another background piece on Trump as racist: Klaus Brinkbäumer: The True Face of Donald Trump.

  • Janine Jackson: "Trump TV": How the Sinclair Merger Would Move Media Further Right: Sinclair is looking to take over Tribune Media.

  • Sarah Jones: Liberals Helped Create Trump's New Bogeyman, the "Alt-Left": Centrists assume that there must be some mirror-image faction on the left for every horror they see on the right, hence an "alt-left" to the white nationalist "alt-right." So when Trump needed to expand on his "many sides" Charlottesville claim, his apologists started looking for words to describe his hypothetical villains, and "alt-left" offered the symmetry they desired, allowing their guarded denials of the right to serve double duty as attacks on the left. By the way, self-proclaimed alt-rightists were more likely to refer to their opponents (a subset of their enemies) as "antifas" (short for anti-fascists). That at least is a label we can live with. However, what rankles most about "alt-left" is that it's primarily used by centrists/liberals trying to score points with conservatives for their willingness to throw their more principled allies under the bus (much like a previous generation's red-baiting).

    Unlike the term "alt-right," which was coined by white supremacists to give their age-old movement a modern edge, the "alt-left" is an insult. As my colleague Clio Chang wrote in March of liberals who choose to use the term: "A graver sin is the adoption of a term that was created by conservatives to smear the left and discredit criticisms of the growing clout of the racist right."

    It should go without saying, but the left does not promote hate crimes or commit them. It does not strive for an ethno-state. It is explicitly anti-racist and feminist. It demands the redistribution of wealth. You may find that terrifying, but it's not actually terrorism. And when a horde of white supremacists overran Charlottesville with their tiki torches and Confederate flags, the left was at the front lines, defending everyone else's right to freedom. A member of the left died for those rights. . . .

    Liberals often use "alt-left" to describe progressives they consider rude or with whom they have Twitter beef; it is personal animus disguised as politics. . . . The function of the term "alt-left" is to collapse the distinction between the activist left and the racist right. That's why reactionaries like Sean Hannity use it. That's why Donald Trump has taken it up. We are likely to hear a lot more about the alt-left in the coming months and years -- and if liberals continue to use it, they will be doing the right-wing's work.

    Shawn McCreesh, in Antifa and the 'Alt-Left', traces out the long history of leftists who specifically focused on opposing Fascist movements, a concern which dates back to the early days of Fascism and Nazism, and which in the late 1930s led some Americans to travel to Spain to aid in the fight against Franco there. I don't know whether there were counter-protests at pro-Nazi rallies in the US (such as the famous one Trump's father attended at Madison Square Garden), but there were certainly many people offended by and opposed to those rallies -- anti-fascism is a stance which many more people agree with than act upon. After Germany declared war on the US (and vice versa), American officials started referring to those individuals as "premature anti-fascists" (I've long thought that would be a good blog title, although the window of opportunity seems to be closing). Ever since WWII it's been pretty much impossible to hold an explicitly Nazi rally in the US (or Europe) without counter-protests. One might construct a similar history of white supremacists, except that the immediate threat of violence (at least in the US, especially in the ex-Confederate states, was always much greater, so there were fewer direct challenges to the KKK and its ilk. (And while the most dependable opponents of lynching in the pre-WWII period were American Communists, I've never heard anyone called a "premature anti-racist.") The thing is, anti-fascism and anti-racism aren't factions of the left -- those are widespread beliefs and sympathies, and to some extend spread even beyond the left.

    As for the "Alt-Left" in Charlottesville, Dahlia Lithwick: Here's What Witnesses Saw.

  • Fred Kaplan: Ugly History Shouldn't Be Beautiful: "What Germany can teach the US about remembering an ugly past without glorifying it."

  • Olga Khazan: The Dark Minds of the 'Alt-Right': Draws on an academic psychology paper surveying "447 self-proclaimed members of the alt-right." The article doesn't refer to the late-1940s work of Adorno and Horkheimer that created the "F-scale" -- a measure of affinity to fascism -- but that's essentially what they reinvented. If you hear about this study, it will probably be to argue that self-identified "alt-right" members don't suffer from economic anxiety -- they're mostly just racists with a persecution complex, and therefore a paranoia about others they see as being unjustly privileged by the system. That may be true, but the alt-right in its various guises is a small and marginal splinter of the public. What Democrats need to worry about is that people who do feel economic anxiety will buy into the alt-right's paranoia instead of more reasonable programs. Of course, it would be a big help there to actually develop some more reasonable programs, and to make them more credible by not sucking up so shamelessly to the very rich.

  • Kevin M Levin: Why I Changed My Mind About Confederate Monuments: This is as good a place as any to start as any. I was ten when the Civil War centennial started and I was very interested in history, so the Civil War made a big impression on me. As a dutiful Kansan, I never doubted the justness of the Union cause, and by then I was beginning to comprehend the evils the South had perpetrated, both in slavery and in the later Jim Crow period. Still, we frequently visited Arkansas and Oklahoma back then -- my mother's grandfather and great-grandfather had fought for the Union but after the war settled in Arkansas, so I had relatives both there and in Oklahoma. And one thing that always puzzled me was why there seemed to be a Southern cannon or other monument in every town square in Oklahoma, which wasn't part of the Confederacy nor even a state until 1908. I knew that monuments were signposts of history, and respected that, but in Oklahoma that history was clearly fake. It took me a while to understand that the monuments were part of a political movement, one that could be called the Counter-Reconstruction but these days is more quaintly known as Jim Crow -- the often-violent restoration of white supremacy in the former slave states (more than just the Confederate states, which is why you see so many Southern markers in border states like Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and Oklahoma). But the great era of Southern monument-building ebbed long ago, and has been in retreat along with the racist policies it was meant to foster. As Southern racists switched political parties from Goldwater on, their fetishism for the Confederate flag and generals should have waned, but we saw little evidence of that until 2015, when a flag-waver massacred nine in a South Carolina church, and Governor Nikki Haley took the lead on lowering the Confederate flag. Since then there's been a broad push to mop up all sorts of racist trash left over from the Civil War/Jim Crow eras, to the extent that nowadays the last folks defending the stuff are unregenerate racists -- a group that sadly features President Trump.

    I might not have cared either way before, but the crowd that came out to defend Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville convinced me that all such monuments have to come down, and the sooner the better: these are people way beyond deplorable, and they should be denied any hint of victory. [Note that former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson says pretty much the same thing: Confederate Statues Are Now 'Rallying Points' for Hate Groups.] As Levin notes: "The national debate over the monuments' future is not unlike what happened in Prague and other cities at the end of the Cold War. And I hope they meet the same fate." He could just as easily have mentioned Saddam Hussein's statues.

    For another example of how monuments and naming are used to shape (pervert really) political space, look at the group that has been working nonstop to institutionalize Ronald Reagan's name in every nook and cranny of the country. Hopefully some day he, too, will be as stripped from the current world as Joseph Stalin. Of course, like Stalin (and Robert E. Lee) he'll never be erased from history -- which, for students, is full of such cautionary tales.

  • Robinson Meyer: What Kind of Monuments Does President Trump Value? Obviously, he likes those Confederate statues -- mementos of a past when most white people were as racist as he still is. But it's more than a little ironic that at the same time he's defending monuments to notorious Americans, he's also "threatening to undo as many as 40 conservation parks" -- aka, National Monuments. Thanks to a law that Teddy Roosevelt signed in 1906, the president can designate any piece of public land as a National Monument. Clinton and Obama used this law a number of times (as did both Roosevelts), but occasionally land so designated is coveted by oil and/or mining companies, and nothing seems to rival profits in Trump's aesthetic sense. By the way, the article includes some gorgeous pictures of endangered National Monuments, plus one picture of a Nathan Bedford Forrest that must count among the world's ugliest (without even factoring its subject in).

  • Justin Miller: Paying for Trump's Tax Cuts Would Devastate the Poor: It's not just who pays less taxes ("90 percent of the taxpayers in the top 1 percent will get a pretty big tax cut") but also who loses out in the inevitable spending cuts needed to offset the tax cuts.

  • Jonathan Ofir: Trump uses Barcelona attacks for incitement to mass murder of Muslims: While Trump struggled with the facts when a white right-wing terrorist struck in Charlottesville, he had no problems at all identifying Muslim terrorists in Barcelona, nor did he make any effort to blame the victims there, as he had in Virginia. Ofir's title is more sensational than the one Yglesias uses below, but it does capture the gist of his tweet.

  • Alex Pareene: Charlottesville Was a Preview of the Future of the Republican Party: Key argument here is that the alt-right is the only group successfully recruiting young people to the Republican Party, so that's where future party leaders will come from. I'm not sure I buy that, given that the rich have never had much trouble hiring help, and they have a nice patronage system even if they can't get you elected.

  • Aja Romano: The President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities resigns, urging resistance against Trump: All 17 members signed the resignation letter. Not a major rebuke, as all were appointed by Obama, so Trump may not have realized that PCAH even existed.

  • Heather Boushey: How the Radical Right Played the Long Game and Won: Book review of Nancy McLean's Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America -- primarily about economist James McGill Buchanan. I've picked up a copy. Hope to get to it soon.

  • Mark Joseph Stern: Joe Arpaio Illegally Tortured Latinos. Of Course Trump Wants to Pardon Him. The former Republican Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona (Phoenix), a long-time grandstanding anti-Latino bigot, was recently convicted of criminal contempt for repeatedly failing to respect civil rights. He was an early Trump supporter, and several reports have Trump granting him a pardon -- perhaps at Trump's planned big rally in Phoenix next week.

    [Arpaio] set up "tent cities" to house overflowing jail population and boasted that they were actual "concentration camps." In the summer, the heat in these facilities reached 145 degrees Fahrenheit; inmates' shoes literally melted. Arpaio told the inmates not to complain, declaring: "It's 120 degrees in Iraq and the soldiers are living in tents and they didn't commit any crimes, so shut your mouths."

    In fact, many of these inmates had not yet been convicted of a crime -- but Arpaio treated all detainees as though they had already been found guilty. He introduced a number of schemes designed to humiliate inmates, including chain gangs for women and juveniles, and a live webcast that broadcast video of jailed pretrial detainees on the internet. One camera captured the toilet in the women's holding cell. The 9th Circuit ultimately blocked these webcasts, but not before millions of people had tuned in.

    Arpaio also worked with former Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas to investigate and prosecute their political enemies. Together, Arpaio and Thomas went after judges who ruled against them, attorneys who opposed them in court, and even a journalist who covered them critically for a local paper. The county wound up paying out tens of millions of dollars in settlement money to Arpaio and Thomas' victims, and Thomas was disbarred. Arpaio famously investigated President Barack Obama's birth certificate, as well, and concluded that it was forged.

    A pardon for Arpaio not only condones this sort of behavior, it promises a "get out of jail card" to others who break the law in ways that align with Trump's prejudices.

  • Matt Taibbi: Fire Steve Bannon: This came out on Thursday, a day before Bannon was actually fired. His reasoning is sound, although that doesn't really explain why Bannon was actually fired.

    The list of nitwits in the Trump administration is long. Betsy DeVos, in charge of education issues, seems capable of losing at tic-tac-toe. Ben Carson thought the great pyramids of Egypt were grain warehouses. Rick Perry, merely in charge of the nation's nuclear arsenal, probably has post-it notes all over his office to remind him what things are: telephone, family photo, souvenir atomic-reactor paperweight, etc.

    Lots of dunces, but chief strategist Steve Bannon, sadly, isn't one of them. The intellectual leader of the alt-right movement is no genius -- nobody with his political views could be -- but neither is he an idiot. He's one of the few people in that White House with even a primitive grasp of long-term strategy, . . .

    But Bannon is the one person in that White House who we know for sure both embraces a white supremacist ideology and has a vision for how to implement it. The mere threat of that, that Trump's political energy might somehow be married to a sober strategy, is terrifying and unacceptable. Bannon saved Trump's political career once. He can't be allowed to do it again; he has to go, and finally let Trump drown on his own.

    Taibbi had two stories to report on. One was to review how Bannon helped turn Trump's campaign around, leading it to improbable victory. The other was a report by Robert Kuttner: Steve Bannon, Unrepentant, which is probably what got Bannon fired, not so much for any particular gaffe as because Bannon stuck his neck out just enough to get it chopped off. We started hearing rumors about Bannon being out back on Monday, which seemed odd because Trump's off-the-rails appearance that day seemed like his most Bannon moment ever. Bannon clearly had enemies within the White House: especially the Goldman-Sachs crowd running the NEC and Treasury, and the hawks trying to dig a deeper hole in Afghanistan (and Syria and Korea and so forth). Sure, any of them could also have found Bannon's racism a little too uncircumspect, but those other issues affected business, not just optics -- and frankly they had given up any claim to shame when they signed up to work for Trump.

    Two takeaways from the Kuttner article: first, Bannon's main preoccupation is starting a major trade war with China, and he's willing to rattle sabres against China to get his way (on the other hand, he views military action against North Korea as hopeless and foolish, and he doesn't see China helping there -- he cites a recent Kuttner article, US vs. North Korea: The Winner? China, as the reason for his call; and second, he trashes the Charlottesville alt-right ("it's losers. It's a fringe element. . . . These guys are a collection of clowns"). The latter may make you wonder why he was reportedly elated when Trump came out defending Nazis and white supremacists, but I suspect that's because he thinks that a big part of Trump's appeal is his readiness to say things that piss off the mainstream media -- to his base, that establishes him as honest and forthright, as someone unwilling to read canned bullshit from a teleprompter.

    Some more Steve Bannon links:

    • Ashley Parker et al.: Trump gets rid of Stephen Bannon, a top proponent of his nationalist agenda: Stresses that Kelly got Bannon fired for being divisive, but here are some interesting quotes on divisions:

      [Bannon] became fixated in recent months on trade and immigration issues, and he had a large dry-erase board in his office that served as a checklist for promises in those areas. But some of his ideas -- such as a proposal to raise the top tax rate on the wealthiest Americans -- were easily batted away by other senior advisers in the White House.

      Bannon had been advocating internally against sending additional troops to Afghanistan, putting him at odds with national security adviser H.R. McMaster and others. Yet he was excluded from a South Asia strategy session Trump convened at Camp David on Friday with nearly two dozen senior officials.

      Bannon has told associates in recent days that if he were to leave the White House, the conservative populist movement that lifted Trump in last year's campaign would be at risk. One person close to him said that the coalition would amount to "Democrats, bankers and hawks." Bannon also predicted that Trump would eventually turn back to him and others who share the president's nationalist instincts, especially on trade.

      There's a link here to an important article that came out in March, essential for understanding Bannon and his political vision: Matea Gold: The Mercers and Stephen Bannon: How a populist power base was funded and built. During his campaign, Trump essentially became a vehicle for Mercer and Bannon and had a knack for selling their vision, but he never built any supporting organization, so once he was elected he fell back on whatever the Republicans already had, which idea-wise was a complete betrayal of Bannon's populist promise.

    • Zack Beauchamp: Steve Bannon tried to destroy "globalism." It destroyed him instead.

    • Tara Golshan: With Bannon out, will Breitbart News go to war with the Trump administration? Threats abound, and there will certainly be some kind of push against Bannon's enemies in the White House, who will be blamed as Trump continues to fail to deliver on many of his alt-right campaign promises. Still, my guess is that what happens depends mostly on Bannon's billionaire sugar daddy, Robert Mercer -- no reason to think he won't continue to be influential in the Trump administration as long as he wants to be (or thinks it worthwhile -- it's already beginning to look like a lost cause). [PS: Bannon was welcomed back at Breitbart; see: Bannon Returns to Breitbart Where He Plans to Keep Boosting Trump; also Trump Thanks Steve Bannon, Cheers On His Return to Breitbart News. Key quote there: "Bannon said that he will continue to fight for Trump's agenda from the outside." Of course, Bannon's view of "Trump's agenda" is uniquely his own -- literally -- and the "real" Trump is bound to disappoint him, though he'll have plenty of opportunities to blame the people surrounding Trump. Expect to hear a lot about how it's better to have someone like Bannon "inside the tent pissing out, vs. outside pissing in."]

    • Rosie Gray: Bannon Is 'Going Nuclear'

    • Mehdi Hasan: Steve Bannon Is Gone, but His Bigotry Stays in the White House: Argues that Bannon's fatal flaw wasn't in-fighting and sure wasn't ideological, just an ego clash with "the Narcissist-in-Chief":

      Thanks to relentless leaking from inside the White House, we have known for some time that Trump has been bothered by the rise and rise of Bannon. He was annoyed by the Time magazine cover story that asked whether the chief strategist was now "the second most powerful man in the world." He was irritated by the #PresidentBannon hashtag on Twitter and upset over the SNL sketch showing Bannon running the White House while the president sits at a kid's desk playing with toys. And, in recent days, Trump was angered by the much-discussed new book by Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain, which suggests that it was the former Breitbart boss who paved the way for Trump's shock victory over Hillary Clinton. "That fucking Steve Bannon taking credit for my election," Trump recently told a friend, according to BuzzFeed News.

    • Ryan Lizza: The Rise and Fall of Steve Bannon: Interesting bit of background here, with Bannon in Shanghai in 2008 giving up on a failed business venture:

      Bannon was looking for his next reinvention. "I came back right before the 2008 election and saw this phenomenon called Sarah Palin," he told me last year. The neo-populist movement that Trump eventually rode to victory was being born in the waning days of that campaign. Bannon thought that Republicans, who had become the party of tax cuts and free-market libertarian philosophy, exemplified by people like Paul Ryan, didn't yet have the right vocabulary to speak to its own base. "The Republicans would not talk about anything related to reality," he told me. "There was all this fucking Austrian school of economic theory."

      Bannon started making what are essentially crude propaganda films about people and issues on the new populist right, including ones about Palin, Ronald Reagan, Michele Bachmann, Phyllis Schlafly, and the Tea Party. He became a fixture on the conservative-conference circuit and befriended Andrew Breitbart, a former blogger and then a new-media entrepreneur who was the hidden talent behind the success of both the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post. Bannon helped Breitbart raise money for Breitbart News Network, including a ten-million-dollar investment from the Mercer family, which during this period emerged as a crucial patron for the populist right. When Breitbart died, in March, 2012, Bannon took over editorial control as well. Traffic exploded, from eleven million page views per month to two hundred million. "Frankly that's why, when Breitbart puts its fucking gun sights on you, your life changes," Bannon bragged to me once.

      In 2013, Bannon and Steven Miller were pushing Jeff Sessions to run for president. The piece doesn't explain how the trio settled on Trump. By the way, I'm pretty sure that Mercer's real politics are closer to the Kochs and the Austrians, but that he supports Bannon (and Trump) because he recognizes the need to cater to the Republican base, and because he's sure he can shut his hirelings down before they do any real harm to the rich. I'm reminded here of Robert Paxton's argument in The Anatomy of Fascism: that fascist movements rise in democratic countries by offering a popular base to the aristocratic/antidemocratic right. The rub there is that no matter how subservient they promise to be, fascists have their own agenda, one that can totally wreck nations. Bannon fits this model perfectly -- not least in thinking of Trump and Mercer not as patrons but as tools for his own glory. Lizza has written several other pieces on Bannon: How Steve Bannon Conquered CPAC -- and the Republican Party (Feb. 24), Can Steve Bannon Save Trumpcare? (Mar. 17), and Firing Steve Bannon Won't Change Donald Trump (Aug. 15).

    • Pter Maass: Steve Bannon said he learned to fear Muslime when he visited Pakistan. Except he was probably in Hong Kong.

    • Jeremy W Peters/Michael M Grynbaum: Steve Bannon, Back on the Outside, Prepares His Enemies List: Of course he has an enemies list. He defines his very being by who he hates.

    • Wil S Hylton: Down the Breitbart Hole: Long Sunday Times article, probably seemed like a good idea when it was commissioned but has been more/less overtaken by events, now that Bannon is out of the White House and returning to Breitbart.

    • Asawin Suebsaeng: Seb Gorka's Fate 'Extremely Uncertain' as His Boss Bannon Is Ousted: I'd say it's pretty much inevitable that Gorka, who worked for Bannon at Breitbart, will be axed soon. Some people think Steven Miller has deeper ties to Trump so may last longer. I'd say Miller's more salient trait is his extreme idolatry of Trump and how readily he's able to contort himself to Trump's every whim, but those traits also make him redundant and superfluous.

  • Matthew Yglesias: Donald Trump's tumultuous week, explained. More Yglesias: The real driver of regional inequality in America; Trump calls for the United States to imitate fake war crimes to fight terrorism; The huge problem with Trump comparing Robert E. Lee to George Washington; 7 things Republicans could do to check Trump without ditching conservative policy; The Trump Tango is tiresome and pointless; Rich CEOs are the big winners of Trump's race war; The real "deep state" sabotage is happening at the Fed.

    From the "Rich CEOs" piece:

    Trump embraces a politics of racial conflict because it works for him.

    As Bloomberg's Joshua Green recounts in his new book Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency, candidate Trump shrugged off media and political attention to his dalliances with the unsavory racist elements of the alt-right. "We polled the race stuff and it doesn't matter," Bannon told Green in September; "it doesn't move anyone who isn't already in [Clinton's] camp."

    The fundamental issue is that the United States contains very few committed and vocal white supremacists (turnout for the Virginia rally was dwarfed by counterprotests nationwide). But it does contain an awful lot of white people. To the extent that politics is seen as a crude zero-sum struggle between racial groups, most of them are going to back the side they perceive as supporting the interests of white people.

    Yet the reality is that while Trump is inflicting tangible disproportionate harm to racial minorities across the country, he's not doing anything substantive to advance the interests of his typical white supporter either. He's loudly embraced a brand of toxic racial politics while quietly creating a narrow winner's circle of C-suite executives and inheritors of vast fortunes. And it's the loyalty of the business class, not of neo-Nazi street brawlers, that ultimately ensures Trump's position of power and is in turn receiving its due rewards. . . .

    Trump and congressional Republicans, for example, deployed the Congressional Review Act to roll back many of the Obama administration's 2016 regulatory actions. Thanks to Trump:

    • It's easier for mining companies to dump pollution into streams.
    • It's easier for oil companies to bribe foreign governments.
    • It's easier for broadband internet providers to sell their customers' user data.
    • But it's now harder for state governments to set up low-fee retirement accounts so people could save money without getting ripped off.

    Trump doesn't tweet about it much, but it turns out that making it harder for people to avoid financial rip-offs is something of a passion for the Trump administration. He has, for example, gutted enforcement of an Obama-era rule that would have made it illegal for financial advisers to deliberately rip off their customers.

    None of this, obviously, has anything to do with helping white people any more than the Trump Federal Communications Commission's ongoing efforts to dismantle net neutrality or the Trump Treasury's efforts to reopen corporate tax loopholes are motivated by concern for the welfare of the European-American population. At the behest of the chemical industry, the Trump Environmental Protection Agency has approved the continued sale of a pesticide that poisons children's brains, and at the behest of for-profit colleges, the Trump Education Department is rolling back regulations offering debt relief to students misled by scam schools.

    The winners here are not "anxious" working-class heartlanders, but the owners and managers of big companies who have the government off their backs and barely even need to defend their stances in public with Trump's antics sucking up the bulk of attention.

  • Angelo Young: After more executives flee, Trump's advisory board, White House claims he planned to disband the council anyway. Related: Matthew Sheffield: Trump's big business CEOs are horrified by his Confederate excuses -- but his religious advisers have nothing but praise.

I wrote a bit recently about how my parents voted for George Wallace in 1968 (not a post, probably in the notebook): they had soured on the Vietnam War (after the next-door neighbor kid was killed there, and my brother and I turned hard against the war), intensely distrusted Dick Nixon, and had no particular fondness for Hubert Humphrey. They weren't particularly racist -- my father still resented the South from the Civil War (his grandfather was named Abraham Lincoln Hull, his father Robert Lincoln), and my mother hailed from an all-white Republican stronghold in Arkansas (her grandfather fought for the union before moving from Ohio to the Ozarks) but they weren't very sensitive about race either, and Wallace's "little guy" message appealed to them. I grew up with Republican leanings, but the war pushed me away from conventional politics. In 1968 I was very enthusiastic about Gene McCarthy's primary challenge to LBJ, and continued to support him through the convention. So I was trying to remember who I preferred in the 1968 election -- certainly not Nixon or Wallace, and while I probably wound up hoping Humphrey would win, I never thought of myself as supporting him. The most likely answer to my question died last week: Dick Gregory. I had long enjoyed his stand-up comedy, and when he ventured into politics in 1967-68, I bought and read his book Write Me In. I was too young to vote in 1968, but certainly would have written him in. He would have made a better "first black president" than the one we wound up having. I never noticed him much after 1968, but according to his Wikipedia page he remain active politically. And I'm sure he could still be funny (when he wasn't dead serious, and sometimes when he was). Here's an obituary.

I also see that Jerry Lewis has died. I was a huge fan, starting about as far back as I can remember. By that time Lewis had already split from Dean Martin (who I later loved for other reasons). I can't say as I ever noticed him much after his 1968-69 talk show (aside from The King of Comedy in 1982), but he was the funniest person in the world for the first decade I was conscious of.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, August 13, 2017

Weekend Roundup

Laura came downstairs yesterday playing Chris Hedges Best Speech in 2017 so I wound up listening to a fair chunk of it. We all know that Hedges in 2007 was a Premature Antifascist -- a term US "intelligence agencies" used to describe Americans who turned against Hitler before Pearl Harbor -- when he published his book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, but is he still "premature" in 2017? The world he decries sounds an awful like the one we have come to live in. If there is a common theme to the stories below, it's that Trump and his crew have moved decisively into a fascist orbit: one that worships naked power while practicing shameless greed. Of course, Trump didn't invent this world. He's just risen to the top, like scum in a stockpot.

Brief scattered links this week:

  • Andrew J Bacevich: Yes Congress, Afghanistan Is Your Vietnam. Also by Bacevich: The Great Hysteria. The latter piece goes beyond his specialty area (losing hopeless wars) to spell out a political agenda which in its diagnosis of the symptoms afflicting America is remarkably similar to that of Hedges above (except, being a conservative, he doesn't blame capitalism):

    Yet these advances have done remarkably little to reduce the alienation and despair pervading a society suffering from epidemics of chronic substance abuse, morbid obesity, teen suicide, and similar afflictions. Throw in the world's highest incarceration rate, a seemingly endless appetite for porn, urban school systems mired in permanent crisis, and mass shootings that occur with metronomic regularity, and what you have is something other than the profile of a healthy society.

    He then follows this up with a ten-point political wish list, including a couple proposals I disagree with (mandate a balanced federal budget, return to a draft-based military) and other more sensible points sure to be rejected by his fellow "conservatives" (e.g., "enact tax policies that will promote greater income equality").

  • Dean Baker: The Zika Vaccine: The Miracle of Government-Funded Research. Also by Baker: Breitbart Strikes Out in Trying to Give Donald Trump Credit for Stock Market Run Up. And this tweet, introducing: Why Is It So Hard for Intellectuals to Envision Alternative Forms of Globalization?

    The upward redistribution from globalization was not an accidental outcome; it was the point of globalization.

  • Doug Bandow: North Korea Does Not Trust America for a Pretty Good Reason. For more history, see: Bruce Cummings: Americans once carpet-bombed North Korea. It's time to remember that past.

  • Celisa Calacal: These two Supreme Court cases protect police who use excessive force.

  • Marjorie Cohn: A Preemptive Strike on North Korea Would Be Catastrophic and Illegal: Well, the second point is bound to fall on deaf ears in Washington, where hardly anyone has any fear of or respect for international law. I'm not sure that Americans ever had any such fear, but for many years after 1945 they at least gave lip service to the idea of international law, and took some effort to pretend to respect it. I think this shift started with the developing Cold War in the late-1940s, as the US found it couldn't use the UN to automatically rubber-stamp its policies, but it was in the 1990s when the US stopped going through the motions. The obvious signal point was when Bush refused to sign the International Criminal Court treaty, but Bush's failure to even consider responding to the 9/11 terror attack via international law shows us how far Washington had already crawled up its own asshole. The two world wars led many people to believe that a strong system of international law was necessary to prevent further wars and genocides -- a goal which stalled under the Cold War, but should have been rekindled after the Soviet Union ended and the free market capitalism had become ubiquitous. Indeed, the mass slaughters in Yugoslavia and Rwanda spurred many nations in that direction, but the neocon ascendancy in the US derailed those efforts, and it's rare today even to find Democrats standing up for the UN, the World Court, and (especially) the ICC.

    There are still people in Washington who recognize Cohn's point about "catastrophic" -- and they're the only real defense we have against Trump's impulsiveness and recklessness. Possibly the most definitive statement of the hopelessness of Trump's evident policy of huffing and bluffing North Korea into submission is Jeffrey Lewis: The Game Is Over, and North Korea Has Won.

  • Esme Cribb: Trump TV Ad Attacks Democrats, Media as 'The President's Enemies': Several things about this ad campaign are unprecedented: I've never before seen a president actively campaigning for re-election six months after taking office, but Trump started a few months back -- especially raising money, in stark contrast to his "self-financed" 2016 campaign; Trump is actively building a "cult of personality" while at the same time claiming a false equivalency between his supporters and the nation; he takes every criticism of his program as a personal attack and tries to turn it into an attack on the nation, who in turn are at least implicitly implored to lash back; he adds an air of whininess, pleading to be allowed to be the dictator he imagined being president to be. In some ways I wish Obama had taken this tack -- if anyone ever had just cause to complain about vilification and obstructionism it was he, but he never would have proclaimed himself "our president," even though his efforts to be "a president of all the people" left his own supporters neglected.

  • Yochi Dreazen: The North Korean crisis won't end until Donald Trump stops talking.

  • John Feffer: Welcome to 2050. The 'Climate Monster' Has Arrived.

  • Katie Fite: Grouse Down: Focuses mostly on the sage grouse population in California, but her description of the political pressures has also been echoed here in Kansas, where Republicans have all but campaigned for the extermination of prairie hens -- a nuisance, evidently, to the local oil industry. Also, note that grouse hunting is a controversy in the UK: Mark Avery: Grouse shooting: half a million reasons why time's up for this appalling 'sport'.

  • Margaret Flowers: Improved Medicare for All Is the Answer: A rebuttal to the recent Nation article, Joshua Holland: Medicare for All Isn't the Solution for Universal Health Care. Flowers answers many point by positing an Improved Medicare for All Act. The real differences have to do with political will, especially in the face of special interests that make a lot of money off the current system, and stand to keep making more and more. One may critique Single Payer/Medicare for All schemes for not being able to fix all of America's many health care problems. But private insurance companies add very little value for their cut of the pie, which makes them the easiest target for reform, and therefore the obvious place to start. But also see: Steven Rosenfeld: Eleven Steps for States to Rein in Health Care Costs While Building Toward Single-Payer. Even if you support single-payer, here is a list of things that can be done (many at the state level) to help manage cost -- things that contribute to providing more/better actual care, which is what we're really looking for:

    1. Create a state-chartered body to process all medical bills with a single form.
    2. Require all private insurers to offer three uniform plans with simple rules.
    3. Create a single state agency to buy drugs for pharmacies and physicians.
    4. Restore hospital price regulation so all facilities charge the same fees.
    5. File anti-trust legal actions against monopolistic hospital networks.
    6. Put price controls in medical group contracts with private insurers.
    7. Reject spending caps for hospitals and patients as that hurts care.
    8. Ban drug company payments to doctors by their sales reps.
    9. Issue public reports on the few doctors causing most medical errors.
    10. Integrate other social safety net services with providing health care.
    11. Give the state subpoena power to review claims and find fraud.

    Also note what's going on in Maryland: Ann Jones: Medicare for All in One State.

  • Thomas Frank: Finally, Democrats are looking in the mirror. That's reason for optimism.

  • Ryan Grim: Gulf Government Gave Secret $20 Million Gift to DC Think Tank: That would be the UAE (United Arab Emirates) and the MEI (Middle East Institute).

  • Gabriel Hetland: Venezuela May Be on the Brink of Civil War: I'm having a tough time getting a coherent explanation of just what's the problem with Venezuela these days, and this doesn't answer many of my questions, but it's a start. (There's also Hetland's Why Is Venezuela in Crisis?, which cites government blundering but also a violent opposition supported by Washington, and the pre-election Greg Grandin: What Is to Be Done in Venezuela?) Of course, never underestimate the power of Donald Trump to make things even worse: Ben Jacobs: Trump threatens 'military option' in Venezuela as crisis escalates.

  • David Leonhardt: Our Broken Economy, in One Simple Chart:

    The chart measures income growth at every percentile starting with 5th, with additional subdivisions for the 99th, at two points in time: 1980 and 2014. There's also an animated chart showing the intervening years, which the lower percentiles being depressed before the top percentile really spikes after 2000. A third chart shows that average income growth dropped from 2.0% in 1980 to 1.4% in 2014, with the median dropping far more than that -- they don't pull the number out, but the median in 2014 is so depressed that only the top 15 percentile receive even the reduced average income growth.

  • Conor Lynch: Emmanuel Macron's Sudden Collapse: French 'Radical Centrist' Now as Unpopular as Trump: Oh my, that was an awfully short honeymoon. Could it be that shameless neoliberalism isn't all that popular? I've seen columns by so-called centrists speculating that Macron's model could be translated to the UK and even to the US. If the US had a top-two runoff like France, I could imagine a fairly charismatic independent (someone like a younger Ross Perot, say, but not Michael Bloomberg) getting close to Macron's first round vote (23.8%), then beating either Trump or Clinton in the runoff (although it's unlikely that either Trump or Clinton would sink that low).

  • Bill McKibben: The Trump administration's solution to climate change: ban the term. And for more on language chance on Trump government websites, see: Oliver Milman/Sam Morris: Trump is deleting climate change, one site at a time.

  • David McCoy: Even a 'Minor' Nuclear War Would Be an Ecological Disaster Felt Throughout the World: Just in case you were wondering.

  • Peter Montgomery: Trump's dominionist prayer warriors: Inside the "Prophetic Order of the United States":

    In the early morning hours of November 9, 2016, God told Frank Amedia that with Donald Trump having been elected president, Amedia and his fellow Trump-supporting "apostles" and "prophets" had a new mission. Thus was born POTUS Shield, a network of Pentecostal leaders devoted to helping Trump bring about the reign of God in America and the world. . . .

    POTUS Shield's leaders view politics as spiritual warfare, part of a great struggle between good and evil that is taking place continuously in "the heavenlies" and here on earth, where the righteous contend with demonic spirits that control people, institutions and geographic regions. They believe that Trump's election has given the church in America an opportunity to spark a spiritual Great Awakening that will engulf the nation and world. And they believe that a triumphant church establishing the kingdom of God on earth will set the stage for Christ's return. Amedia says that the "POTUS" in the group's name does not refer only to the president of the United States, but also to a new "prophetic order of the United States" that God is establishing.

    Related: Chris Hedges: What Trump Owes America's Christian Fascists.

  • Sarah Newell: Is Foxconn a Fantasy? The High Cost of Bringing Manufacturing Jobs to Wisconsin. Trump and Gov. Scott Walker are bully on a deal where giant Chinese electronics Foxconn would build a factory, adding 3000 jobs in Wisconsin, maybe 13000 eventually. All they need in return:

    In order for this plan to become a reality, the Wisconsin state legislature would need to approve $3 billion in corporate incentives to defray capital costs and workforce development costs. The math is startling: Wisconsin will pay out $230,000 in tax dollars for each one of the 13,000 jobs. This means Wisconsin taxpayers will shell out $66,000 per year to subsidize jobs that will pay less than the state average income.

  • Trita Parsi: For Netanyahu and the Saudis, Opposing Diplomacy With Iran Was Never About Enrichment: An excerpt from Parsi's new book, Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy. I suspect that the real reason both Israel and Saudi Arabia decided to take such rejectionist stands against Iran was that they realized that they could push American buttons by doing so -- most Americans have harbored deep-seated grudges against Iran ever since the fall of the Shah and the Hostage Crisis -- thereby elevating their own importance in Washington's eyes. They've doubled down since the Iran deal, and while leaving the deal intact (so far), both countries have effectively increased their influence in Washington (especially with Trump).

  • William Rivers Pitt: We Have Been at War in Iraq for 27 Years: It started in 1990, when Saddam Hussein misinterpreted ambiguous signals from a US ambassador as a go-ahead to invade Kuwait, an oil-rich sheikdom that, following American inclinations, had made large loans to Iraq for its war against Iran -- loans it then insisted Iraq must repay. The first George Bush thought he'd get a nice political boost from a quick little war, but sold it by comparing Saddam to Hitler, digging a hole for political himself when the initial Gulf War came up short -- a hole which Clinton defended and deepend through his sanctions and no-fly zones until the Bush II decided to fix it by plunging the US into a massive occupation morphing into a civil war which led to ISIS and Obama re-entering Iraq. Throughout this whole quarter-century, official Washington doctrine has blocked out any and all dissent against the ever-expanding sinkhole of Middle Eastern carnage fed by the massive introduction of US troops in 1990. Actually, one can point to a few earlier signs of the wars to come: US inheritance of British outposts around the Gulf, Carter's declaration that the Persian Gulf is an US security area, Reagan's installation of American troops in Lebanon, and US support for proxy wars against Afghanistan and Iran. Any way you slice this, the only Americans with any clue as to how this might go awry were the antiwar protesters. And note that while Pitt focuses on Iraq, US involvement in Afghanistan started in 1979 -- 38 years ago -- and is at least as far from resolution (never mind success) there as it is in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, anywhere else you find American drones and/or special forces.

  • Aja Romano: Google fird "politically incorrect" engineer has sparked a broad ideological debate: Actually, I only see a relatively narrow debate here, which is corporations can fire employees for what we would otherwise deem constitutionally protected free speech. I would favor more such protections, but these days it's hard to stop a company -- especially one without a union -- from firing anyone for any reason. The two most obvious reasons for firing this particular engineer are that he's very stupid, and that by exposing that stupidity he's embarrassed the company. But I don't see him engendering any serious debate on his claim that women aren't competent at software engineering. More on this: Cynthia Lee: I'm a woman in computer science. Let me ladysplain the Google memo to you.

  • Anis Shivani: How we got from George W. Bush to Donald Trump: Liberals had more to do with it than we'd like to think: Big thought piece which is probably a bit harsh on Obama but reminds us how extreme the Bush-Cheney agenda was, and how little of it was rolled back by Obama.

    We need to remind ourselves that the early years of the Bush administration felt utterly radical, that the defense of freedom of speech and mobility, of the civility and respect that make a constitutional democracy work, never felt so threatened, never felt more precious and worth saving, as in those years. That feeling, unfortunately, is gone now, despite Trumpism and whatever else will follow, because the anti-constitutional innovations have become normalized. This happened particularly because the succeeding Democratic administration did not take any steps to counter, philosophically, any of the constitutional violations, or even the disrespect for science, reason and empiricism that had deeply saturated the public discourse.

    I think it's fair to say that Obama left most of his anti-Bush critique on the campaign trail. I'm not sure how to partition the blame for that between his wholesale adoption of Clintonites in his administration and his innate conservatism, with its emphasis on projecting continuity and stability. Clearly, he missed the opportunity to do important things: to roll back the corrosive effects of money on politics; to return to a previous American belief in international law and institutions; and to lean back against increasing inequality. One might counter that he had difficulty enough with more modest efforts on health care, finance reform, and climate change.

    Still, the main difference between the Bush-Cheney agenda and Trump's is the relative shamelessness of the latter -- the garrish greed, the naked lust for power, and the absence of any scruples over how to get the riches they crave. You'd think that would blow up in their face -- that if nothing else the American people and media are still capable of being shocked by corruption. But then why hasn't that already happened? Can you mark that all down to "normalization"?

  • Richard Silverstein: Bibi: "This is the End, My Friend": On the corruption scandal that threatens to bring down Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, with sideward glances toward Trump's own nest feathering. Silverstein also wrote Israel to Shutter Al Jazeera, Join Ranks of Arab Authoritarian Regimes Suppressing Press Freedom. As for everyday life in Israel-Palestine, see Kate's latest news clip compendium: Settler violence against Palestinians nearly doubled from 2016 to 2017. This includes a quote from Gideon Levy about how certain nations have held themselves to be above international law and norms:

    More than 100 states signed the international treaty banning the use of cluster bombs; Israel, as usual, isn't one of them. What has Israel to do with international treaties, international law, international organizations -- it's all one big unnecessary nuisance. Israel's fellow rejectionists are, as usual, Russia, Pakistan, China, India and of course the United States, the world's greatest spiller of blood since World War II. This is the company Israel wants to keep, the club it belongs to. Cluster bombs are an especially barbarous weapon, a bomb that turns into countless bomblets, spreading over a wide area, killing and wounding indiscriminately. They sometimes explode years after were fired. The world was appalled and disgusted by such a weapon of mass destruction, and for good reason. The world -- but not Israel. We're a special case, as is commonly known. We're allowed to do anything. Why? Because we can. This has been proved. We used cluster bombs in the Second Lebanon War and the world was silent. We also use flechettes, unmercifully. In 2002 I saw a soccer field in Gaza hit by IDF flechette shells, which spray thousands of potentially lethal metal darts. All the children playing on it had been hit.

  • Matt Taibbi: Is LIBOR, Benchmark for Trillions of Dollars in Transactions, a Lie? Well, sure.

  • Clara Torres-Spelliscy: Trump Is Already Profiting From His 2020 Campaign.

  • Jason Wilson/Edward Helmore: Charlottesville: one dead after car rams counter-protesters at far-right gathering: I skipped over several articles leading up to Saturday's right-wing rally to oppose removing a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from a park in Virginia, and "counter-protests" against those defending the pro-slavery icon. However, the events were interrupted when someone droves his car into the "counter-protest" crowd, killing one and injuring 19, then managed to drive off. A police helicopter later crashed in the area, adding two to the death toll.

    Related links: Sheryl Gay Stolberg/Brian H Rosenthal: Man Charged After White Nationalist Rally in Charlottesville Ends in Deadly Violence; Summer Concepcion: David Duke: Charlottesville Rally 'Fulfills the Promises of Donald Trump; Esme Cribb: What We Know About the Man Accused of Ramming Car Into C'Ville Protesters; Michael Eric Dyson: Charlottesville and the Bigotocracy; Josh Matshall: "I'm Not the Angry Racist They See in That Photo" (complains a misunderstood white guy; but when you go around complaining about "the slow replacement of white heritage within the United States" -- when you even think "white heritage" is a thing -- you're racist); Colbert L King: These are your people, President Trump; Glenn Thrush/Maggie Haberman: Trump Is Criticized for Not Calling Out White Supremacists; Esme Cribb: Trump Didn't Want to 'Dignify' White Supremacy by Condemning It (but he has no qualms about dignifying "radical Islamic terror" or Rosie O'Donnell?); German Lopez: We need to stop acting like Trump isn't pandering to white supremacists; and, just for historical context: Philip Bump: In 1927, Donald Trump's father was arrested after a Klan riot in Queens. One thing I noticed during the campaign was that Trump was quick to reverse himself whenever he inadvertently blurted out something contrary to conservative doctrine -- as when he initially argued that women seeking abortions should be punished -- but he never apologized for the violence of his supporters, nor did he ever disown the white supremacists who rallied to his cause.

  • Jana Winter/Elias Groll: Here's the Memo That Blew Up the NSC: The author was Rich Higgins, a Flynn acolyte who has since been fired:

    The full memo, dated May 2017, is titled "POTUS & Political Warfare." It provides a sweeping, if at times conspiratorial, view of what it describes as a multi-pronged attack on the Trump White House.

    Trump is being attacked, the memo says, because he represents "an existential threat to cultural Marxist memes that dominate the prevailing cultural narrative." Those threatened by Trump include "'deep state' actors, globalists, bankers, Islamists, and establishment Republicans."

  • Zak Witus: To Combat Trump's Attacks on Democracy, We Must Understand Precedents Set by Obama: "Seven months into the Trump presidency, many people still deny how some of Donald Trump's most regressive and harmful policies directly continue the legacy of Barack Obama." That's true in a number of cases ranging from prosecution of "leakers" to brutal ICE tactics to Saudi arms sales and drone murders around the world, though the bigger problem is that Obama failed "to change the way we think about war" and many more things -- race, equality, the culture of corruption. Part of that was his "no drama" pledge to restore competency to government after the politicized corruption of the Bush years -- something he rarely claimed credit for, and which few Americans even noticed. One thing about Trump is that he has no quibbles about taking credit for "good" things, regardless of how little he was actually involved, while chalking all of his obvious failures up to "fake news."

  • Matthew Yglesias: What to know about the biggest stories of the week: We had a lot of loose talk about nuclear war; Trump feudud with Mitch McConnell; the opioid crisis gets an official "state of emergency"; Paul Manafort seems to be in legal trouble. Other Yglesias pieces this week: Trump's new immigration plan would make Americans poorer; Big business wants you to think a tax cut for big business will stop outsourcing; The looming debt ceiling fight, explained; Donald Trump gets a daily briefing all about how great he is.

When I looked at Crooked Timber I noticed that Laura Tillem had one of the recent comments. It was in response to Henry Farrell's Five Books, listing five novels:

  • John Le Carré, A Perfect Spy
  • Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend
  • Dennis Lehane, The Given Day
  • Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings
  • Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

I had to look up the authors (although I guessed 3/5, maybe 4). We were recently talking about how much I enjoyed the 1998 BBC/PBS series of Our Mutual Friend, and we had recently watched the 1987 TV rendition of A Perfect Spy (which I didn't much care for). I doubt I've read enough novels (probably about 50, which wouldn't last my wife a year) to construct such a list -- only obvious one is Thomas Pynchon, V., though the unfinished Gravity's Rainbow might have wound up even better.

I probably could offer a list of non-fiction:

  • George P Brockway, The End of Economic Man: Principles of Any Future Economics
  • Geert Mak, In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century
  • John McPhee, Annals of the Former World
  • Jan Myrdal, Angkor: An Essay on Art and Imperialism
  • David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions

My "recent books" roll currently runs 552 books, so that at least is a sample (roughly from 2003 to the present), although only one of the books listed above comes from it (Mak's magnificent history-qua-travelogue).

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, July 30, 2017

Weekend Roundup

I shot most of my war back on Thursday's Midweek Roundup, and have had limited time since then. But still I couldn't ignore these items:

Some scattered links:

  • Tariq Ali: Nawaz Sharif has gone. But Pakistan's high-level corruption survives:

    Sharif's party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, is fighting back, accusing the court of a vendetta -- which usually means that his billions could not buy a single judge. This is truly exceptional. Life in Pakistan has not been morally salutary for any of its citizens. The family politics represented by the Bhutto-Zardaris and their rivals, the Sharifs, is swathed in corruption. Each has learned from the other how best to conceal it, minimising paperwork and juggling accounts. Many years ago, when Benazir Bhutto was prime minister, she asked me what people were saying about her. "They're saying your husband is totally corrupt, but are not sure about how much you know . . ."

    She knew all right, and was not in the least embarrassed: "You're so prudish. Times have changed. This is the world we live in. They're all doing it. Politicians in every western country . . ." Her husband, the president-to-be Asif Ali Zardari, was imprisoned by Sharif, but no actual proof of corruption was discovered: Zardari's loyalty to his cronies was legendary, and they remained loyal in return. Sharif, it appears, has been less fortunate.

  • Dean Baker: How about a little accountability for economists when they mess up?

  • Robert A Blecker: Trump's "America first" strategy for NAFTA talks won't benefit US workers

  • Carole Cadwalladr: Al Gore: 'The rich have subverted all reason': Ten years after his documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Gore is back with a sequel and goes beyond simply remind us, "I told you so." One thing he's started looking at is the money:

    "I mean that those with access to large amounts of money and raw power," says Gore, "have been able to subvert all reason and fact in collective decision making. The Koch brothers are the largest funders of climate change denial. And ExxonMobil claims it has stopped, but it really hasn't. It has given a quarter of a billion dollars in donations to climate denial groups. It's clear they are trying to cripple our ability to respond to this existential threat."

    One of Trump's first acts after his inauguration was to remove all mentions of climate change from federal websites. More overlooked is that one of Theresa May's first actions on becoming prime minister -- within 24 hours of taking office -- was to close the Department for Energy and Climate Change; subsequently donations from oil and gas companies to the Conservative party continued to roll in. And what is increasingly apparent is that the same think tanks that operate in the States are also at work in Britain, and climate change denial operates as a bridgehead: uniting the right and providing an entry route for other tenets of Alt-Right belief. And, it's this network of power that Gore has had to try to understand, in order to find a way to combat it.

  • Alexia Fernandez Campbell: What McCain did was hard. What Murkowski and Collins did was much harder. I suppose McCain's vote to sink the so-called "skinny repeal" does qualify as "something useful for once" (a prospect I doubted when I cited Alex Pareene's I Don't Want to Hear Another Fucking Word About John McCain Unless He Dies or Actually Does Something Useful for Once). But McCain couldn't have cast the killing vote without Collins and Murkowski consistently voting against all of McConnell's ploys to repeal Obamacare -- in large part because they seem to be the only Republicans who actually care about the bottom-line assessments that the bills would deprive upwards of twenty million Americans of health insurance.

    Through all of this, the backlash against these two women senators was severe. Two House Republicans threatened them with violence.

    President Trump publicly shamed Murkowski on Twitter:

    Senator @lisamurkowski of the Great State of Alaska really let the Republicans, and our country, down yesterday. Too bad!

    Murkowski then got a call from Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who reportedly threatened to punish Alaska's economy based on her health care vote, according to the Alaska Dispatch News.

    You might recall that Murkowski actually lost the Republican primary last time out to Tea Party fanatic Joe Miller, then beat Miller with a write-in campaign, so she's entitled to some independence (or maybe she's already written off the hardcore right). It will be interesting to see how much internecine blood is spilt over "repeal-and-replace" and other supposed Republican failures, but Reagan's so-called "eleventh commandment" has long vanished: it seems almost certain that each and every Republican who broke ranks even once will face right-wing primary challengers. Even more amusing is the pouting tantrum from John Daniel Davidson: I'm a conservative -- and I now see voting Republican is a waste of time: "The Obamacare fiasco reveals that once they are in power, Republicans in Washington refuse to deliver on their promises."

  • Tom Engelhardt: Bombing the Rubble: "Precision warfare? Don't make me laugh." Also: William D Hartung: The Hidden Costs of "National Security": "Ten ways your tax dollars pay for war -- past, present, and future>"

  • William G Gale: The Kansas tax cut experiment: Now that Sam Brownback's moving on to become Trump's Ambassador at Large for Religious Freedom, a position that will better fit his sanctimonious twaddle and hopefully is powerless enough to limit how much real damage (as opposed to mere embarrassment) he does, the Brookings Institute is finally getting around to looking at his late, great signature tax scam (blessed in the beginning by none other than Arthur Laffer, his paid consultant). Some of the bullet points:

    • Under his plan, the tax rate on pass-through business income fell to 0. The idea was to boost investment, raise employment, and jump-start the economy.
    • The Kansas economy did not grow faster than neighboring states, the country itself, or even Kansas' own growth in previous years.
    • The experiment with tax policy was such a failure that a Republican controlled legislature not only voted to raise taxes, but did so over the veto of the governor.
    • Second, a lowered business income tax can be manipulated. While Kansas cut the tax rate on pass-through income to 0 in hopes of promoting economic activity, the growth simply didn't happen. In reality, many people in Kansas re-characterized income from labor into business-form in order to take advantage of the 0 percent tax rate.
    • There are other, more general, takeaways from the tax cut experiment. When Kansas cut taxes, its bond rating went down, and it had to cut central services such as education and infrastructure. After seeing this, a majority of Kansans decided they would not prefer to keep the tax cuts.
    • Therefore, another implication is that tax reform is not just about taxes, rather what taxes pay for. Taxes and spending are linked.

    The tax cuts threw the state into a permanent budget crisis, forcing spending cuts (and other desperate measures which ultimately weakened the state's credit rating) at a time when courts consistently found the state to be violating the requirement (part of the state constitution) to adequately fund local schools. As Republicans try to pass federal "tax reform" they'll be recycling many of the same nostrums Brownback used in Kansas, so beware.

  • Jack Gross: The American Model: Book review of James Q Whitman: Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. "What appears to be still difficult, even as it gets told in ever finer detail, is the simple and immense situation that America and Nazi Germany are two instantiations of a single history of white supremacist rule." It's well known that South Africa based its Apartheid legal system on America's Jim Crow laws. The Nazi case is less clear, but Hitler admired America in several respects -- white supremacy is the one detailed here. As I recall, he also saw America's advance across the continent as a model for his own Eastern conquests -- what we proclaimed as Manifest Destiny he called Lebensraum.

  • Jim Hightower: Fight for your right to fix your own iPhone: I'm not surprised that Apple is in the forefront of companies seeking to maximize their profits and control of customers by "repair prevention." Actually, I was recently was looking at a Microsoft Surface computer and read that you can't get into it to repair it without destroying the case -- one, I suspected, of many traits they copied from Apple. We live in an age where is it often cheaper to replace something than to repair it, which may be good for various companies but as a society it is wasteful and degrading.

  • Mike Konczal: This Small Regulation Shows Us How the Economy Could Work for Everybody: Part of Dodd-Frank the Republicans want to get rid of, because all that regulation limits the ability of big banks to goose up their profits by price-gouging and other fraudulent means.

  • Peggy Noonan: Trump Is Woody Allen Without the Humor: Unfair to Allen, of course -- I'd rather watch Interiors (possibly the most unfunny movie ever made, not merely the unfunniest by Allen) than a Trump rally speech -- but no one ever looked to Noonan for fair, or for that matter for insight. But as a piece of anti-Trump snark this rivals Maureen Dowd:

    He's not strong and self-controlled, not cool and tough, not low-key and determined; he's whiny, weepy and self-pitying. He throws himself, sobbing, on the body politic. He's a drama queen. It was once said, sarcastically, of George H.W. Bush that he reminded everyone of her first husband. Trump must remind people of their first wife. Actually his wife, Melania, is tougher than he is with her stoicism and grace, her self-discipline and desire to show the world respect by presenting herself with dignity.

    Half the president's tweets show utter weakness. They are plaintive, shrill little cries, usually just after dawn. "It's very sad that Republicans, even some that were carried over the line on my back, do very little to protect their president." The brutes. . . .

    His public brutalizing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions isn't strong, cool and deadly; it's limp, lame and blubbery. "Sessions has taken a VERY weak position on Hillary Clinton crimes," he tweeted this week. Talk about projection. . . .

    His inability -- not his refusal, but his inability -- to embrace the public and rhetorical role of the presidency consistently and constructively is weak.

    "It's so easy to act presidential but that's not gonna get it done," Mr. Trump said the other night at a rally in Youngstown, Ohio. That is the opposite of the truth. The truth, six months in, is that he is not presidential and is not getting it done. His mad, blubbery petulance isn't working for him but against him. . . .

    We close with the observation that it's all nonstop drama and queen-for-a-day inside this hothouse of a White House.

    Noonan closes with Anthony Scaramucci ("He seemed to think this diarrheic diatribe was professional"), without making the obvious point: that he's Trump's perfect "communications director" because he recapitulates Trump's own communications style -- just classed up a bit by extending Trump's third-grade vocabulary and grammar into puberty, as if that's all it's going to take to get the snooty sophisticates to stop laughing at him. Noonan cites historian Joshua Zeitz's comment: "It's Team of Rivals but for morons."

    Still, there is no reason to think that Noonan is transitioning into some kind of satirist. It's safe to say she's the same paid political hack she's been since Ronald Reagan signed her checks. What happened last week was that Trump, aided by Scaramucci, found a way to escape from his orthodox Republican chapperones and go out on a joyride. They did manage to ditch Reince Priebus, but while John Kelly will no doubt prove a sterner nanny, his job of containing Trump will likely prove taxing. Meanwhile, it's not just Noonan among the party hacks who are sounding alarms about Trump; e.g., Charles Krauthammer: Longing for a self-contained, impenetrable Trump:

    Transparency, thy name is Trump, Donald Trump. No filter, no governor, no editor lies between his impulses and his public actions. He tweets, therefore he is.

    Ronald Reagan was so self-contained and impenetrable that his official biographer was practically driven mad trying to figure him out. Donald Trump is penetrable, hourly.

    Wrong metaphor. Trump and Reagan were similar in one respect: neither had anything coherent going on between their ears, just chaos and bestial desires. The difference was that Reagan was an actor (and more importantly, a paid corporate spokesman) who could credibly read the scripts he was given, whereas Trump just improvises (often making shit up)-- not because he's any good at it but because all his life he's been a boss surrounded by ego-stroking sycophants. Krauthammer, like many conservatives, is upset over Trump's taunting of Jeff Sessions, who's been hard at work implementing the conservative agenda to undermine democracy and rig the justice system while Trump's been throwing his juvenile tantrums.

    Given how rare it is for such committed Republican cronies as Noonan and Krauthammer to break ranks, their attacks on Trump may mark the end of the honeymoon. Orthodox Republicans may not have liked Trump back in the primary season, but they figured he'd be manageable once he got the nomination, and they were suddenly delighted with him once he did the one thing they most coveted: winning. And indeed he has proven pliable in terms of policy and personnel, abandoning every shred of independent thinking he displayed during the campaign. As long as he was helping them get what they wanted, they could tolerate his idiosyncrasies. But evidently something has changed: not just that he's proving ineffective and unpopular -- the health care debacle is really more their fault than it is Trump's -- but that he's becoming needlessly dangerous and self-destructive.

  • Trita Parsi: The Mask Is Off: Trump Is Seeking War With Iran:

    President Donald Trump has made it clear, in no uncertain terms and with no effort to disguise his duplicity, that he will claim that Tehran is cheating on the nuclear deal by October -- the facts be damned. In short, the fix is in. Trump will refuse to accept that Iran is in compliance and thereby set the stage for a military confrontation. His advisers have even been kind enough to explain how they will go about this. Rarely has a sinister plan to destroy an arms control agreement and pave the way for war been so openly telegraphed.

    The unmasking of Trump's plans to sabotage the nuclear deal began two weeks ago when he reluctantly had to certify that Iran indeed was in compliance. Both the US intelligence as well as the International Atomic Energy Agency had confirmed Tehran's fair play. But Trump threw a tantrum in the Oval Office and berated his national security team for not having found a way to claim Iran was cheating. According to Foreign Policy, the adults in the room -- Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, and National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster -- eventually calmed Trump down but only on the condition that they double down on finding a way for the president to blow up the deal by October.

  • Matt Shuham: Trump Calls for 'Rough' Policing, Gives Blessing to Law Enforcement Abuses: Probably one of the ten scariest articles of the Trump era. Sure, there have been many instances where Trump looked to be endorsing ad-hoc violence against protesters, foreigners, other minorities -- why not suspected criminals? Well, because abuses eat at and eventually destroy the very notion that we live under a fair and equitable system of law and justice. And has become very clear over the past few years, what we have now is already way too permissive of police abuses. Indeed, quite a few police superintendents have come to recognize that bringing their forces under control is a major public relations concern. So what Trump is saying undermines responsible police as well as the entire system of justice, and helps to make American civil society coarser and more hateful.

    On the same speech: Dara Lind: Trump just delivered the most chilling speech of his presidency. In reaction, see: Cleve R Wootson Jr/Mark Berman: US police chiefs blast Trump for endorsing 'police brutality'.

  • Matt Taibbi: The Anthony Scaramucci Era Will Be Freakish, Embarrassing and All Too Short:

    In the space of a week, Trump's new press expert demonstrated that he a) didn't know how to hold off-the-record conversations b) didn't understand that cameras and microphones keep rolling even when the red light is off and c) doesn't bother to check the other public statements made by administration officials before he makes statements of his own. An alien crashed on earth and given a two-minute tutorial on dealing with reporters would have done a better job. . . .

    The Communications Director job in the Trump administration is a no-win job, because the real Communications Director is Trump's Twitter feed. The job that Scaramucci technically occupies is a thankless and redundant position that involves standing before reporters and reconciling avalanches of already-circulated lies, contradictions, and insulting/ignorant statements.

    Even a genius of the highest order couldn't make this work. Of course, Trump hasn't had geniuses available to him. The fourth-rate minds he has instead had in his employ just started raging trash-fires whenever they tried to logically explain Trump's utterances.

    They gave us statements like Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts," or Katrina Pierson's bit about how Trump wasn't changing his position on immigration, but rather "changing the words that he is saying."

  • Matthew Yglesias: The most important stories of the week, explained: The Senate rejected three versions of ACA repeal; Trump named a new Chief of Staff; Trump kind of banned transgender military service; Trump feuded with his attorney general.

  • Reuters: US flies B-1B bombers over Korean peninsula after missile test: Not clear from the article whether they actually flew into North Korean air space, which would be daring the Koreans to shoot a plane down, dramatically escalating America's snit fit over North Korea's missile tests. Also: Tom Phillips: China and Russia have 'responsibility' for North Korea nuclear threat, says US. Reminds me that Casey Stengel once said that the secret to successful managing was keeping the guys who hate you (like North Korea) away from the ones on the fence (like Russia and China) -- a lesson Rex Tillerson never learned. The odds of Trump (or one of those generals he gives carte blanche to) doing something profoundly stupid over Korea have been steadily increasing -- much as it has with Iran (see Trita Parsi, above).

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, July 23, 2017

Weekend Roundup

I'm having a lot of trouble with websites making demands: that I pay them money, or sign up for things, or other demands I don't have the patience to parse. I understand that internet media businesses have a tough time making ends meet, and I'm not unsympathetic, but I'm not rich, and I'm not in the business of reporting on media, and I really hate where this is going: a world where information is locked up behind a handful of companies, where people have to decide something is worth paying for before they can find out whether it's worth anything at all. In such a world many people will only be able to read things that they value because they agree with, and most people will never read anything because the practical value of most information is vanishingly small. This is a hideous prospect promising a world that only grows more and more dysfunctional. Allowing paywalls to be bypassed by agreeing to look at tons of advertising only makes the information more untrustworthy and unappealing. Advertising may not be the root of all evil in America, but it's certainly contributed, especially by raising consumer manipulation to the level of a science.

I should probably compile a list of websites I'm boycotting -- or, effectively, that are boycotting me -- but I find the practice too annoying to obsess over. Looks like I should add the Washington Post to the list -- clicked on several pieces and all I get now are subscription screens. (The ad there started "I see you like great journalism" but the WP has rarely met that mark; e.g., see The Washington Post's War on Disability Programs Continues, and ask yourself: why should anyone pay these people money?) I'm especially annoyed at The Nation blocking me out, and have decided to stop linking to their articles. (We actually subscribe to the print edition of The Nation, which as I understand it entitles us to "full digital access" but I've never set that up before -- indeed, never had to.) I've started to avoid The New York Times and The New Yorker -- again, we pay them money for print editions, but they have "free article" counters, and I'd hate to waste my quota by looking at something stupid by David Brooks. We actually pay for quite a bit of print media, and my wife subscribes to digital things I don't even know about (and probably wouldn't be happy about if I did know). Still, we don't read so much or so widely because we find it entertaining or necessary for business. We do it because we're trying to be concerned, responsible citizens. And it sure looks like the goal of business in America is to make citizenship cost-prohibitive.

I'll add that I don't have paywalls, advertisements, or even any form of begware on my websites. I'm not paid for what I write, nor do I make any money off the occasional music discs I'm sent. I do this for free, and find that at least a few people find my analysis and information to be useful and worthwhile -- I guess that's my reward (that plus satisfaction in my craft). I even spend some money to make this possible, but I do feel the need to limit my losses. In this current media environment, that may mean limiting the sources I consult.

PS: Add Foreign Policy to that list, demanding about $90/year under the unsavory slogan, "Today, truth comes at a cost." The link I was following came from WarInContext: Trump assigns White House team to target Iran nuclear deal, sidelining State Department. This probably complements several links on Iran below.

Scattered links:

  • Binta Baxter: How the Student Loan Industry Is Helping Trump Destroy American Democracy: Also, how Trump's helping the student loan industry.

  • Cristina Cabrera: Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner Have Raked in $212 Million Since 2016.

  • Daniel José Camacho: Hillary Clinton is more unpopular than Donald Trump. Let that sink in: At least before the election, she polled better than Trump. You'd think she'd do even better after six months of Trump's non-stop scandals, but many recent polls show she'd still lose, and the Democrats have yet to register tangible gains by targeting Trump -- despite Trump's own favorability polling sinking into "worst ever" territory. Still, I'd take these polls with a grain of salt. Clinton's own favorability ratings have taken a hit partly because people who voted for her -- mostly people who would never have voted for Trump -- are still pissed at her for losing. As for the Democrats, they've yet to move on from her -- something that probably won't happen until the 2018 campaigns get seriously under way. Meanwhile, for all the scandal in Washington, there hasn't been a lot of evident everyday damage that most people can blame directly on Trump (immigrants are the exception here). Those things will compound over the next year -- something Democrats need to position themselves for.

  • Jonathan Cohn: Only 32 House Democrats Voted Against Reauthorizing Trump's Deportation Machine: Note, however, 9 Republicans also voted no.

  • Thomas Frank: The media's war on Trump is destined to fail. Why can't it see that? Wait, there's a "media war on Trump"? How can you tell? Didn't mainstream media gave Trump ten times as much coverage in 2016 as they did anyone else? The New York Times gave him an interview sandbox just last week. Sure, it made him look stupid, but doesn't that just play into his appeal? One might argue that Steven Colbert and Seth Myers are waging something like a war on Trump, but they're also catering to large niche market of people who can't stand Trump (and who have insomnia, possibly related). But mainstream media -- the so-called objective reporters -- are fatally compromised by corporate direction and an eye towards entertainment, and both of those factors have played into Trump while leaving the right-wing takeover of the Republican Party largely unexamined. One could imagine a responsible media going after Trump's administration, examining in depth the conflicts of interest, the money trails, the intense lobbying both of business fronts and other interests like the NRA and AIPAC -- and they needn't be partisan (all the better if they catch a few corrupt Democrats along the way). But that's not going to happen as long as the media is owned by a handful of humongous conglomerates. On the other hand, Trump's own war on the "fake news" media does seem to be working, if not to deter them from serious reporting, to reinforce the tendency of his believers to disregard anything critical they may come up with.

  • Glenn Greenwald/Ryan Grim: US Lawmakers Seek to Criminally Outlaw Support for Boycott Campaign Against Israel:

    The Criminalization of political speech and activism against Israel has become one of the gravest threats to free speech in the West. In France, activists have been arrested and prosecuted for wearing T-shirts advocating a boycott of Israel. The U.K. has enacted a series of measures designed to outlaw such activism. In the U.S., governors compete with one another over who can implement the most extreme regulations to bar businesses from participating in any boycotts aimed even at Israeli settlements, which the world regards as illegal. On U.S. campuses, punishment of pro-Palestinian students for expressing criticisms of Israel is so commonplace that the Center for Constitutional Rights refers to it as "the Palestine Exception" to free speech.

    But now, a group of 43 senators -- 29 Republicans and 14 Democrats -- wants to implement a law that would make it a felony for Americans to support the international boycott against Israel, which was launched in protest of that country's decades-old occupation of Palestine. The two primary sponsors of the bill are Democrat Ben Cardin of Maryland and Republican Rob Portman of Ohio. Perhaps the most shocking aspect is the punishment: Anyone guilty of violating the prohibitions will face a minimum civil penalty of $250,000 and a maximum criminal penalty of $1 million and 20 years in prison.

    Also see: Philip Weiss: Critics of US 'Israel Anti-Boycott Act' say even requests for information could expose citizens to penalties. For an example of a similar state bill, see Heike Schotten/Elsa Auerbach: National movement to silence BDS disguises itself in MA legislature as 'No Hate in Bay State' act.

    As this is happening, there are dozens of articles on the unfolding human catastrophe in Gaza; e.g. Gaza on Verge of Collapse as Israel Sends 2.2 Million People "Back to Middle Ages" in Electricity Crisis. There is also renewed violence in the West Bank; see: Jason Ditz: Six Killed, Hundreds Wounded as Violence Rages Across West Bank; Sheren Khalel: Three settlers stabbed to death and three Palestinians shot dead in turmoil over security measures at al-Aqsa mosque compound; also always useful to check out Kate's latest press compilation.

  • Benjamin Hart: Obamacare and the Limits of Propaganda:

    But now, Republicans control every lever of the federal government, and any illusion that replacing Obamacare would be simple has been well and truly shattered. Instead, the relentless news coverage around health care has finally revealed Republicans' philosophy on the issue: nothing more than knee-jerk opposition to the previous president combined with an overwhelming desire to cut taxes for wealthy Americans.

    And by thus far rejecting any reasonable fixes to the law, the GOP has inadvertently helped drag the American public to the left. A recent Pew survey found that 60 percent of Americans now believe that government has a responsibility to ensure health care for its citizens, the highest number in a decade. That includes 52 percent of Republicans with family incomes below $30,000, up from 31 percent a year ago.

    Propaganda works best when the enemy it conjures is hazy and easily caricatured; it works less well when everyday reality intrudes. Americans have now gotten a taste of what citizens in other industrialized nations have long become accustomed to, and they don't want less of it. They want more.

  • John Judis: The Conflict Tearing Apart British Politics: An Interview With David Goodhart: Judis' interviews have generally been interesting, but this one gets pretty stupid. Goodhart's distinction between Somewheres and Anywheres isn't ridiculous -- certainly they're more neutral terms than Provincials and Cosmopolitans, but that's pretty much what they boil down to. On the other hand, the way he maps British partisan politics onto his concepts is scattered and arbitrary, obviously intent primarily on marginalizing Jeremy Corbyn, who he clearly detests on all levels:

    Jeremy Corbyn probably represents the view of about five percent of the British people, but a lot of naďve people don't remember the 1970s and the 1980s and the thing called the Soviet Union. They live in this ahistorical world. Even older people who are not so naďve and realize that Jeremy Corbyn was not to their taste in almost every respect nonetheless planned to vote for him as a protest against Brexit on the assumption that he was not going to be prime minister. The things that pushed him up, gave him twelve points more than were expected, were the very high turnout of the blob youth left, the hard core Remainers, and enough of the blue collar voters coming back to Labour on anti-austerity grounds. . . .

    I think the traditional Labour coalition has blown apart, but on a one-off basis Jeremy Corbyn has managed to stitch it back together sufficiently to give him the uplift of ten percent in the vote. By going helter skelter for the educated or semi-educated youth vote and playing on the soft left ideology that so many kids come out of the university with, combined with this bribe to abolish student tuition fees, he is shoring up for his own political ends, the middle class welfare state. So he has this huge uplift of the student vote and enough of the blue-collar vote, but it's a one-off and I think Labour is still on the road to oblivion as a party.

    I don't know anything more about Goodhart -- e.g., I have no idea why he should be considered some sort of expert on UK politics -- but he seems like a prime example of neoliberalism, especially in his disdain for "the middle class welfare state" and his painting anything government might do to help out any but the poorest of citizens as a "bribe" -- and needless to say the poor who still do get some paltry dole will also face a substantial helping of shame. The left's counter to this is to establish a set of rights which raise everyone up.

    Goldhart's view of Labour as a declining, obsolescent political force seems to be stuck in the "end of history" fantasies prevalent in the US/UK after the collapse of Communism. Until the fall, the ruling capitalists in the West at least had a healthy fear of worker revolution, and therefore sought to make society and economy more palatable. After the collapse, they lost that fear, and went on a binge of greed that still hasn't subsided, even though they seemed to trip up severely with the 2008 meltdown. Meanwhile, the left tried to rethink and regroup. A recent, interesting piece on this is: Tim Barker: The Bleak Left. I haven't finished it, and have my own ideas which gradually formed as I was trying to write about post-capitalism in the late 1990s. One of the first things I did was to jettison Marx, reinterpreting his revolutionary impulses not as early-proletarian but as late-bourgeois. Paraphrasing Benjamin on Baudellaire, I saw him (and later Marxists) as "secret agents, of the bourgeoisie's discontent with its own rule." That brought me back to equality as the foundation seed both of liberal politics and any just society. No way to properly unpack this here, but given recent trends toward extreme inequality (thanks mostly to neoliberalism, although inherited money also has much to do with it, especially on the US right) it isn't at all surprising that the left would reform to countervail, and that it would draw both on liberal and on socialist traditions to do so.

  • Sam Knight: Trump's Environmental Protection Pick Is BP's Former Lawyer -- and May Preside Over Cases Involving BP.

  • Mike Konczal: "Neoliberalism" isn't an empty epithet. It's a real, powerful set of ideas. Centrist Democrats are getting touchy about being called "neoliberal" -- even in The Nation I've seen Danny Goldberg (link, if you can read it, here) insist that the left stop using the term. He doesn't offer an alternative, but the first one that pops into my mind is "corporate stooges" -- "neoliberal" at least suggests some degree of coherence and integrity. Konczal tries to sketch out how that ideology developed historically, going back to Charles Peters' 1983 "A Neoliberal's Manifesto." Since then, adherents have preferred to call themselves New Democrats (or New Labour in Britain), while British critics have tended to use neoliberal for macroeconomic policies that promoted free flow of capital and trade while forcing governments to adopt austerity, with no linkages to other issues (thus, for instance, one could be neoliberal on economic policy, neoconservative on war, and either liberal or conservative on social issues). However, at present neoliberalism is a cleavage line that splits Democrats -- even if Clinton had to compromise on trade and college tuition to secure the 2016 nomination. Indeed, neoliberal only became an epithet as it became clear that its promises of widespread prosperity turned out to be not just hollow but fraudulent.

  • Richard Lardner: Lawmakers Announce Bipartisan Deal on Sweeping Russia Sanctions Bill: Proves two things: (1) nothing brings a nation together like a shared enemy, even a phony one; and (2) the Democrats have still not made a serious review of America's habit of imperial power projection, even though it objectively hurts both their base and their political message. A crude way to understand the latter point is that the only times Republicans join with Democrats is when they intuit that doing so hurts (and helps disillusion) the Democratic Party base. Democrats wouldn't have to go full isolationist to turn the corner on the neocon fetish with single-power projection that has dominated US policy since the mid-1990s. (The Iraq regime change vote marked their ascendancy, again keyed to take advantage of an enemy Democrats wouldn't doubt.) Democrats could, for instance, revert to their early beliefs in international law and institutions -- a belief that led to the UN, an organization the neocons have managed to totally marginalize (except when they can use it). That reminds me of a third point: this bill again testifies to the singular anomaly of US subservience to Israel. You'd think at the very least that Democrats would defend Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, but their allegiance to Israel trumps party loyalty.

    One should note that while Congress is limiting Trump's power to reduce international tensions by curtailing sanctions, that same body is evidently giving Trump a free hand to start any war that strikes his fancy. See (if you can): John Nichols: Paul Ryan Hands Donald Trump a Blank Check for Endless War.

  • Dylan Matthews: President Trump's essentially unlimited pardon power, explained: Reports are that Trump has already started discussing using his pardon powers to obstruct the Russia investigation. Can he do that? Yes. Would that be grounds for impeachment? Probably. Will the Republican congress act on that? Nope. Also, where early reports merely stated that Trump was asking about his pardon powers, now he seems to have gotten the answer he wants: Cristina Cabrera: Trump Asserts His 'Complete Power' to Pardon. On the other hand, Laurence Tribe argues No, Trump can't pardon himself. The Constitution tells us so.

  • Caitlin MacNeal: Spicey's Greatest Hits: Trump spokesman Sean Spicer resigned this week, after Anthony Scaramucci was appointed as White House Communications Director. Link has videos of some of Spicer's more famous gaffes, but his root problem was the material he had to work with, and the so-called journalists who cover the presidency and can't seem to dig deeper than press briefings and Trump's twitter feed. Scaramucci is a hedge fund guy, which makes you wonder what he's doing slumming in the White House staff. His first job, of course, was to clean up his own twitter history: Cristina Cabrera: Scaramucci on Twitter Deletion Spree.

  • Tom McKay: Trump Nominates Sam Clovis, a Dude Who Is Not a Scientist, to be Department of Agriculture's Top Scientist: But he did work as host of a right-wing talk show back in Iowa.

  • Heather Digby Parton: Trump rejects his poll numbers as fake news -- but even his voters are starting to notice the scam.

  • John Quiggin: Can we get to 350ppm? Yes we can: A relatively optimistic forecast on climate change, based largely on recent technological trends like much cheaper solar power, but noting various risks, and assuming "the absence of political disasters such as a long-running Trump presidency." Links to a contrasting, downright apocalyptic view, not specifically linked to Trump: David Wallace-Wells: The Uninhabitable Earth.

  • Lisa Rein: Interior Dept. ordered Glacier park chief, other climate expert pulled from Zuckerberg tour

  • Sam Sacks: Trump Kicks Off Voter Fraud Commission With Innuendo That States Are Hiding Something. Kris Kobach's voter suppression racket is one of the most disgusting of Trump's programs. Still, it's rather a shock to see Trump so personally involved with it.

  • Matt Taibbi: What Does Russiagate Look Like to Russians? Kind of like Americans are war-crazed fanatics whose hatred of Russia is less ideological than genetic?

    For journalists like me who have backgrounds either working or living in Russia, the new Red Scare has been an ongoing freakout. A lot of veteran Russia reporters who may have disagreed with each other over other issues in the past now find themselves in like-minded bewilderment over the increasingly aggressive rhetoric.

    Many of us were early Putin critics who now find ourselves in the awkward position of having to try to argue Americans off the ledge, or at least off the path to war, when it comes to dealing with the Putin regime.

    There's a lot of history that's being glossed over in the rush to restore Russia to an archenemy role.

    For one, long before the DNC hack, we meddled in their elections. This was especially annoying to Russians because we were ostensibly teaching them the virtues of democracy at the time.

    The case in point was Boris Yeltsin's 1966 campaign, where "three American advisers [were] sent to help the pickling autocrat Yeltsin devise campaign strategy." Yeltsin then created the corrupt oligarchy we like to blame on Putin.

    Evidently, one of the rarest skills in the world is the ability to imagine how other people view us.

  • Trevor Timm: ICE agents are getting out of control. And they are only getting worse: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (not sure why the article refers to them as "Ice" rather than "ICE"). They've had the legal authority, for some time, so all Trump had to do to crank them up was "take the shackles off" ("eerily echoing the CIA's comments post-9/11 that they would 'take the gloves off' in response to the terrorist attack"). Of course, Trump is doing more: "stripping away due process protections for arrested immigrants via executive order, the US justice department has even attempted to cut off legal representation for some immigrants."

  • Robin Wright: Is the Nuclear Deal With Iran Slipping Away? Also on Iran: Trita Parsi: War with Iran is back on the table -- thanks to Trump. By the way, Parsi, who wrote the definitive book on why Israel decided to pump Iran up as "an existential threat" (Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States) has a new book Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy.

  • Matthew Yglesias: The most important stories of the week, explained: the Obamacare repeal push died, then came back; John McCain has brain cancer; Donald Trump said some things; House Republicans released a budget plan. Other Yglesias pieces: Trump's new communications director used to call him an anti-American hack politician (not any more: see Cristina Cabrera: Scaramucci on Twitter Deletion Spree); Trumpcare still isn't dead; A new interview reveals Trump's ignorance to be surprisingly wide-ranging; The latest Trump interview once again reveals total disregard for the rule of law; Trump is mad Democrats didn't work with him on health care, but he never tried. Also, here's a Yglesias tweet:

    Look, just because Sessions hasn't actually been convicted of a crime is no reason we can't start seizing his property now.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

prev -- next